Using network flows for surface modeling

We apply network flow techniques to a problem arising in the computer aided design of cars, planes, ships, trains, and the like: Refine a mesh of spheric polygons, which approximates the surface of a workpiece, so that the resulting mesh is suita.ble for a numerical a.nalysis. In commercial CAD systenx, this problem is usually solved in a greedy-like fashion, which leaves the user a lot of patchwork to do afterwards. The global approach introduced here avoids those local traps and yields solutions that require significantly less additional patchwork.