The application of three-dimensional (3-D) CAD has been popularized for design and production and digital manufacturing has been spreading in many industrial fields. By simulation of the production process using 3-D digital models, which are the core of CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) system, the efficiency and safety of production are improved at each stage of work, and optimization of manufacturing can be achieved. This paper firstly describes the concept of "simulation based production" in shipbuilding and also digital manufacturing; the 3-D CAD system is indispensable for effective simulation because ship structure is three dimensionally complex. By simulation, "computer optimized manufacturing" can be possible. The most effective fields of simulation in shipbuilding are in jobs where many parties have to cooperate, while existing two-dimensional drawings are hardly observed the whole structures due to interference between structures or equipment of complex shape. In this paper some examples of the successful application in IHIMU (IHI Marine United Inc.) are shown: assembly of a pipe unit, erection of a complex hull block, carriage of equipment, installation of a propeller, and access in an engine room.

Performing inspections for Hull Condition Monitoring and Assessment as stipulated in IACS unified requirements and IMO's Condition Assessment Scheme (CAS) IMO Resolution MEPC.94(46), 2001, Condition Assessment Scheme, IMO Resolution MEPC.111(50), 2003, Amendments to regulation 13G, addition of new regulation 13H involves a huge amount of measurement data to be collected, processed, analysed and maintained. Information to be recorded consists of thickness measurements and visual assessment of coating and cracks. The amount of data and increasing requirements with respect to condition assessment demand efficient computer support. Currently, due to the lack of standardization for this kind of data, the thickness measurements are recorded manually on ship drawings or tables. In this form, handling of the measurements is tedious and error-prone and assessment is difficult. Data reporting and analysis takes a long time, leading to some repairs being performed only at the next docking of the ship or making an additional docking necessary. The recently started ED funded project CAS addresses this topic and develops-as a first step-a data model for Hull Condition Monitoring and Assessment (HCMA) based on XML-technology. The model includes simple geometry representation to facilitate a graphically supported data collection as well as an easy visualisation of the measurement results. In order to ensure compatibility with the current way of working, the content of the data model is strictly confined to the requirements of the measurement process. Appropriate data interfaces to classification software will enable rapid assessment by the classification societies, thus improving the process in terms of time and cost savings. In particular, decision-making can be done while the ship is still in the dock for maintenance.

To survive in the current shipbuilding industry it is of vital importance for shipyards to achieve an optimal utilization of resources, make an achievable planning and ensure that this planning is kept. Possible problems should be eliminated before production starts and if unexpected disturbances occur in the actual production the right measures should be taken. Due to the dynamic nature of the production process, the continuous variation in products and the complexity of both, all this can hardly be achieved with conventional static planning and analysis systems. Simulation provides a solution here, since this enables the modelling and evaluation of the dynamic relations between product and production process. After a global introduction to production simulation in general and the application of simulation at the Flensburger shipyard, this paper presents a tool that has been developed to simulate the various complex assembly processes taking place at shipyards. Subsequently the simulation model for the subassembly production at Flensburger, in which this tool is applied, will be discussed.

The paper presents an optimization system which integrates a parametric design tool, 3D diffraction-radiation analysis and hydrodynamic performance assessment based on short and long term wave statistics. Controlled by formal optimization strategies the system is able to design offshore structure hulls with superior seakeeping qualities. The parametric modeling tool enables the designer to specify the geometric characteristics of the design from displacement over principal dimensions down to local shape properties. The computer generates the hull form and passes it on to the hydrodynamic analysis, which computes response amplitude operators (RAOs) for forces and motions. Combining the RAOs with short and long-term wave statistics provides a realistic assessment of the quality of the design. The optimization algorithm changes selected shape parameters in order to minimize forces and motions, thus increasing availability and safety of the system. Constraints ensure that only feasible designs with sufficient stability in operation and survival condition are generated. As an example the optimization study of a semisubmersible is discussed. It illustrates how offshore structures can be optimized for a specific target area of operation.

Nowadays major shipbuilding companies are trying to expand their business not only to shipbuilding but to offshore projects as well. DSME is one of them. DSME is trying to set up a flexible design and construction environment for shipbuilding and offshore construction in a single shipyard. The shipbuilding and offshore projects, however, have their unique technology but they need to be designed and constructed in one site. To support this new requirement, DSME has developed an integrated CAD system for ship and offshore projects. In this integrated design environment, the designers can design commercial ships and offshore projects in a flexible manner. Concurrent design is very important for ship and offshore design. As compared to the complexity of the product, the design period is quite short. In effect, the design system for the ship and offshore project has to support concurrent design. One essential point of concurrent design environment is a product model based design system. DSME has developed and implemented the 3D product model concurrent design environment based on Tribon M3. Tribon is a widely used CAD system in shipbuilding area that is developed by Tribon Solutions. DSME has both customized the Tribon system and developed in-house application systems to support its own design and production procedures. All the design objects are modeled in one common database to support concurrent design and accurate production. The major in-house development focused on the modeling automation and automatic drawing generation. During the drawing generation process many of the additional production information are also extracted from the 3D product model. In addition, several applications and functionalities have been developed to apply the shipbuilding based Tribon M3 system to offshore projects. The development of shape nesting, tubular connection, isometric drawing, grating nesting systems are the typical.

In rapid prototyping, the optimal part orientation during fabrication is critical as it can improve part accuracy, minimize the requirement for supports and reduce the production time. Through investigating the geometric issues of STL model and process planning of RPM, This paper establishes optimizing model based on the considerations of staircase effect, support area and production time. The general satisfactory degree function is constructed employing the multi-objective optimization theory based on the general satisfactory degree principle. The best part-building orientation is obtained by solving the function employing generic algorithm. Experiment shows that the methods can effective resolve the part-building orientation in RP.

A new method to obtain explicit re-parameterization that preserves the curve degree and parametric domain is presented in this paper. The re-parameterization brings a curve very close to the arc length parameterization under $L_2$ norm but with less segmentation. The re-parameterization functions we used are $C^1$ continuous piecewise rational linear functions, which provide more flexibility and can be easily identified by solving a quadratic equation. Based on the outstanding performance of Mobius transformation on modifying pieces with monotonic parametric speed, we first create a partition of the original curve, in which the parametric speed of each segment is of monotonic variation. The values of new parameters corresponding to the subdivision points are specified a priori as the ratio of its cumulative arc length and its total arc length. $C^1$ continuity conditions are imposed to each segment, thus, with respect to the new parameters, the objective function is linear and admits a closed-form optimization. Illustrative examples are also given to assess the performance of our new method.

Based on the smoothness criterion of minimum curvature variation of the curve, tangent angle constraints guaranteeing an optimized geometric Hermite (OGH) curve both mathematically and geometrically smooth is given, and new methods for constructing composite optimized geometric Hermite (COH) curves are presented in this paper. The comparison of the new methods with Yong and Cheng's methods based on strain energy minimization is included.

In this paper, we propose a new triangular finite element mesh generation method based on simplification of high-density mesh and adaptive Level-of-Detail (LOD) methods for efficient CAE. In our method, mesh simplification is used to control the mesh properties required for FE mesh, such as the number of triangular elements, element shape quality and size while keeping the specified approximation tolerance. Adaptive LOD methods based on vertex hierarchy according to curvature and region of interest, and global LOD method preserving density distributions are also proposed in order to construct a mesh more appropriate for CAE purpose. These methods enable efficient generation of FE meshes with properties appropriate for analysis purpose from a high-density mesh. Finally, the effectiveness of our approach is shown through evaluations of the FE meshes for practical use.

This paper describes a method for extracting surfaces from multi-material CT (Computed Tomography) data. Most contouring methods such as Marching Cubes algorithm assume that CT data are composed of only two materials. Some extended methods such as [3, 6] can extract surfaces from the multi-material (non-manifold) implicit representation. However, these methods are not directly applicable to CT data that are composed of three or more materials. There are two major problems that arise from fundamentals of CT. The first problem is that we have to use n(n-1)/2 threshold values for CT data contains n materials and select appropriately one threshold value for each boundary area. The second is that we cannot reconstruct only from CT data in which area three or more materials are adjacent each other. In this paper, we propose a method to solve the problems by using image analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with application examples construct polygon models from CT data of machine parts.

This paper presents a novel approach for non-iterative surface smoothing with feature preservation on arbitrary meshes. Laplacian operator is performed in a global way over the mesh. The surface smoothing is formulated as a quadratic optimization problem, which is easily solved by a sparse linear system. The cost function to be optimized penalizes deviations from the global Laplacian operator while maintaining the overall shape of the original mesh. The features of the original mesh can be preserved by adding feature constraints and barycenter constraints in the system. Our approach is simple and fast, and does not cause surface shrinkage and distortion. Many experimental results are presented to show the applicability and flexibility of the approach.

Engineering graph plays an important role in design and manufacture, such as architecture, machinery, manufacture, military. However, almost no persons consider the security and copyright of two-dimensional engineering graph. A novel method for two-dimensional engineering graph watermark based U system is proposed in this paper. Watermarks generated by this technique can be successfully extracted even after rotation, translation and scaling transform.

Thickness is a commonly used parameter in product design and manufacture. Its intuitive definition as the smallest dimension of a cross-section or the minimum distance between two opposite surfaces is ambiguous for intricate solids, and there is very little reported work in automatic computation of thickness. We present three generic definitions of thickness: interior thickness of points inside an object, exterior thickness for points on the object surface, and radiographic thickness along a view direction. Methods for computing and displaying the respective thickness values are also presented. The internal thickness distribution is obtained by peeling or successive skin removal, eventually revealing the object skeleton (similar to medial axis transformation). Another method involves radiographic scanning along a viewing direction, with minimum, maximum and total thickness options, displayed on the surface of the object. The algorithms have been implemented using an efficient voxel based representation that can handle up to one billion voxels (1000 per axis), coupled with a near-real time display scheme that uses a look-up table based on voxel neighborhood configurations. Three different types of intricate objects: industrial (press cylinder casting), sculpture (Ganesha idol), and medical (pelvic bone) were used for successfully testing the algorithms. The results are found to be useful for early evaluation of manufacturability and other lifecycle considerations.

Recently with the development of 3D modeling and digitizing tools, more and more models have been created, which leads to the necessity of the technique of 3D mode retrieval system. In this paper we investigate a new method for 3D model retrieval based on orthogonal projections. We assume that 3D models are composed of trigonal meshes. Algorithms process first by a normalization step in which the 3D models are transformed into the canonical coordinates. Then each model is orthogonally projected onto six surfaces of the projected cube which contains it. A following step is feature extraction of the projected images which is done by Moment Invariants and Polar Radius Fourier Transform. The feature vector of each 3D model is composed of the features extracted from projected images with different weights. Our System validates that this means can distinguish 3D models effectively. Experiments show that our method performs quit well.

Nowadays, many commercial CAD systems support history-based, constraint-based and feature-based modeling. Unfortunately, most systems fail during the re-evaluation phase when various kind of topological changes occur. This issue is known as "persistent naming" which refers to the problem of identifying entities in an initial parametric model and matching them in the re-evaluated model. Most works in this domain focus on the persistent naming of atomic entities such as vertices, edges or faces. But very few of them consider the persistent naming of aggregates like shells (any set of faces). We propose in this paper a complete framework for identifying and matching any kind of entities based on their underlying topology, and particularly shells. The identifying method is based on the invariant structure of each class of form features (a hierarchical structure of shells) and on its topological evolution (an historical structure of faces). The matching method compares the initial and the re-evaluated topological histories, and computes two measures of topological similarity between any couple of entities occurring in both models. The naming and matching method has been implemented and integrated in a prototype of commercial CAD Software (Topsolid).

Catmull-Clark subdivision scheme provides a powerful method for building smooth and complex surfaces. But the number of faces in the uniformly refined meshes increases exponentially with respect to subdivision depth. Adaptive tessellation reduces the number of faces needed to yield a smooth approximation to the limit surface and, consequently, makes the rendering process more efficient. In this paper, we present a new adaptive tessellation method for general Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Different from previous control mesh refinement based approaches, which generate approximate meshes that usually do not interpolate the limit surface, the new method is based on direct evaluation of the limit surface to generate an inscribed polyhedron of the limit surface. With explicit evaluation of general Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces becoming available, the new adaptive tessellation method can precisely measure error for every point of the limit surface. Hence, it has complete control of the accuracy of the tessellation result. Cracks are avoided by using a recursive color marking process to ensure that adjacent patches or subpatches use the same limit surface points in the construction of the shared boundary. The new method performs limit surface evaluation only at points that are needed for the final rendering process. Therefore it is very fast and memory efficient. The new method is presented for the general Catmull-Clark subdivision scheme. But it can be used for any subdivision scheme that has an explicit evaluation method for its limit surface.

This paper presents a novel approach for constructing a piecewise triangular cubic polynomial surface with $C^1$ continuity around a common corner vertex. A $C^1$ continuity condition between two cubic triangular patches is first derived using mixed directional derivatives. An approach for constructing a surface with $C^1$ continuity around a corner is then developed. Our approach is easy and fast with the virtue of cubic reproduction, local shape controllability, $C^2$ continuous at the corner vertex. Some experimental results are presented to show the applicability and flexibility of the approach.

In order to model blending surfaces with curvature continuity, in this paper we apply sixth order partial differential equations (PDEs), which are solved with a composite power series based method. The proposed composite power series based approach meets boundary conditions exactly, minimises the errors of the PDEs, and creates almost as accurate blending surfaces as those from the closed form solution that is the most accurate but achievable only for some simple blending problems. Since only a few unknown constants are involved, the proposed method is comparable with the closed form solution in terms of computational efficiency. Moreover, it can be used to construct 3- or 4-sided patches through the satisfaction of continuities along all edges of the patches. Therefore, the developed method is simpler and more efficient than numerical methods, more powerful than the analytical methods, and can be implemented into an effective tool for the generation and manipulation of complex free-form surfaces.

Recently, wire-EDM became a necessity for many engineering applications, particularly in the dies making. No-Core cut process is helpful for operations in which falling slug can jam the machine or wire. In this paper a proposed CAM system (called NCPP) is introduced, to overcome the limitations of the existing CAM systems in the machining of No-Core cut. The proposed CAM system (NCPP) provides pocketing of No-core cut and optimal selection of the position of starting hole (wire threading point), to minimize toolpath length. It was written for data exchange between CAD-CAM-CNC machines. This data model will become part of the ISO (Data model for Computerized Numerical Controllers) international standard. The NCPP system has been implemented in Visual C++. Many examples are used to illustrate NCPP system. The results show that, NCPP saves the machining time by significant value. This value depends on the shape and complexity of the workpiece that is being cut.

In this paper, an integration framework of Geometric Constraint Solving Engine and AutoCAD is presented, and a dynamic geometric constraint system is introduced. According to inherent orientation features of geometric entities and various Object Snap results of AutoCAD, the' proposed system can automatically construct an under-constrained geometric constraint model during interactive drawing. And then the directed constraint graph in a geometric constraint model is realtime modified in order to produce an optimal constraint solving sequence. Due to the open object-oriented characteristics of AutoCAD, a set of user-defined entities including basic geometric elements and graphics constraint relations are defined through derivation. And the custom-made Object Reactor and Command Reactor are also constructed. Several powerful characteristics are achieved based on these user-defined entities and reactors, including synchronously processing geometric constraint information while saving and opening DWG files, visual constraint relations, and full adaptability to Undo/Redo operations. These characteristics of the proposed system can help the designers more easily manage geometric entities and constraint relations between them.

A CAD/CAM system has been developed for rapid prototyping (RP) of microfluidic devices based on excimer laser micromachining. The system comprises of two complementary softwares. One, the CAM tool, creates part programs from CAD models. The other, the Simulator Tool, uses a part program to generate the laser tool path and the 2D and 3D graphical representation of the machined microstructure. The CAM tool's algorithms use the 3D geometry of a microstructure, defined as an STL file exported from a CAD system, and process parameters (laser fluence, pulse repetition frequency, number of shots per area, wall angle), to automatically generate Numerical Control (NC) part programs for the machine controller. The performance of the system has been verified and demonstrated by machining a particle transportation device. The CAM tool simplifies part programming and replaces the tedious trial-and-error approach to creating programs. The simulator tool accepts manual or computer generated part programs, and displays the tool path and the machined structure. This enables error checking and editing of the program before machining, and development of programs for complex microstructures. Combined, the tools provide a user-friendly CAD/CAM system environment for rapid prototyping of microfluidic devices.

Plunge milling is the fastest way to mill away large volumes of metal in the axial direction. The residual volume (inaccessible volume by the plungers) is minimized when selecting a specific direction of filling. This direction is known as the optimal inclination angle for filling of the plunged area. This paper proposes a new algorithm to calculate the optimal inclination angle of filling and to fill the plunged area with multi-plungers sizes. The proposed algorithm uses the geometry of the 2D area of the shape that being cutting to estimate the optimal inclination angle of filling. It is found that, the optimal inclination angle for filling of the plunged area is the same direction as the longer width of the equivalent convex polygon of the boundary contour. The results of the tested examples show that, the residual volume is minimized when comparing the proposed algorithm with the previous method.

Practical automated flat pattern generation with inbuilt production features for doubly curved sheet metal components (SMCs) is addressed here utilizing a new and unique Point Transformation Algorithm (PTA). This is the third in the series of papers on practical Flat Pattern Development (FPD) [8] and Production Loft Generation Systems (PLGS) [9] complementing the pioneering work [6,7]. In the first two publications, automated loft generation programs have addressed sheet metal components having a Principal Flat Surface (PFS) only. The flat pattern development of 3-D components that do not have the flat surface(termed as Non-PFS components) having complex features of double curvature in addition to cutouts and nibbled holes typical of aircraft components were so far not addressed due to lack of relevant published algorithms. This paper traces the evolution of developments and provides the record of fully illustrated, automated loft generation scheme for aircraft SMCs including the Non-PFS components which underwent validation through production tests by sponsors. Details of some of the unique features of the system like simplified surface model generation, termed as topological model and powerful algorithms deployed with potential for CAD/CAM applications are included.