A Model to Quantify Work Space Availability for Space—Contrained Scheduling Within a CAD Environment

In any given process work area, a task or activity requires a specific amount of space for its execution. This required space must be accommodate by the physical space of the work area defined at the location and time period at which the activity is scheduled to be executed. If this required space becomes limited or unavailable, the execution of the activity may be difficult and sometimes not possible. As a result, it is highly desirable to acknowledge work space availability of the work area during the scheduling process. This paper describes a model to generate work space availability of the process work area directly from a CAD model. Using a proposed work area block structure hierarchy, the model integrates several procedures to quantify and extract the three dimensional space of the work area utilizing computer modeling capabilities and geometric reasoning.