An algorithm for determining consistency and manufacturing of dimensioned drawings

In the one dimensional case (vertical or horizontal dimensioning of a parallel sided object) the question of whether an object is consistently dimensioned may be answered simply in graph theoretical terms. The representation as a graph of a dimensioning scheme has vertices corresponding to the faces of the object and possesses an edge between two vertices if the corresponding pair of faces is dimensioned. A one dimensional scheme is consistent if its graph is a tree. In this paper we extend this concept to 2 dimensions. We give a graph theoretical characterisation of consistency and manufacturability and an algorithm which detects these properties. The algorithm also yields a construction sequence for converting a dimensioned drawing into a Cartesian coordinate representation.