A National Repository for Design and Process Planning

The National Institute of Standards and Technology s NIST Design Planning and Assembly Repos itory is a publically accessible collection of D and D CAD and solid models taken from a wide variety of sources in industry and academia The goal of this project is to provide research and development e orts with a means to obtain and share examples focus on benchmarks and identify areas of research need The Repository is available through the World Wide Web at URL http www parts nist gov parts The Design Planning and Assembly Repository is an e ort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST joining government agencies industry and academia to provide a library of example data for use by the research community The ascendency of the Internet and the World Wide Web has provided the communication medium to build vital online libraries having wide user bases and access and it is the goal of the Repository to give researchers access to a wide variety of problems taken from industry thus improving the base of common working knowledge for the community and giving students access to challenging and high impact problems The Repository will also provide a focal point for collaboration allowing researchers to post challenge problems to a wide audience share results or perform larger scale experiments requiring bigger data sets with industrially relevant data It is our belief that establishment of this Internet enabled communal library will hasten advances in manufacturing process planning feature recognition and assembly planning The NIST Design Planning and Assembly Repository http www parts nist gov parts has ini tially been designed to serve three research communities Manufacturing Process Planning Fea ture Recognition and Feature based Manufacturing and Assembly Planning Although signi cant progress has been made in these areas at present there are no fully automated process planning systems capable of automatically performing the complete planning task Further complicating matters is that most previous research e orts have proceeded in isolation each focusing on some particular sub domain with its own idiosyncratic examples Current needs require a more e cient mechanism for collecting and dissemi nating examples Repository