Retrieval and reconstruction of heterogeneous feature data for collaborative design

Heterogeneous CAD data exchange is very important in collaborative product development and also extremely difficult. Feature-based data exchange has many advantages than traditional geometry-based data exchange. According to the framework of procedure recovery in feature-based data exchange, this paper discusses the key issues of feature extraction and reconstruction, including the extraction of first-order feature information, extraction of second-order feature information and the reconstruction of feature model. The proposed methods have been tested in experiments. The result shows that propsed approach has efficiently improved the former researches, such as ISO/STEP method, Macro command method and UPR method.