Next generation computer-aided design and geometric modeling technologies

竞争激烈的世界市场正在推动对新产品设计的需求不断增长。随着设计活动的不断增加，已有几十年历史的计算机辅助设计（CAD）软件技术要跟上CAD硬件技术的发展，面临着巨大的压力。预计下一代CAD系统将建立在虚拟3D平台上，具有大大增强的交互式设计环境。这个基于虚拟现实的CAD系统有潜力作为计算机化的设计助手与设计师一起工作，并且能够执行当今不易获得的高级设计建模操作。特别是，现有的CAD软件技术已经基于刚性代数结构的几何建模方案，这是已知的缺乏支持人类的创造力。提出的研究计划旨在开发一种新的几何建模方案，该方案将根据设计师的创造性思维过程而不是当前CAD系统所需的繁琐和增量建模步骤，形成创建和修改CAD模型的基础。通过模拟人类认知设计过程的高级几何建模工具，设计师在CAD建模环境中的创造力将得到促进。

The competitive world market is powering a growing demand for new product designs. The much increased design activities have placed significant pressure on the decades-old computer-aided design (CAD) software technologies to keep up with the CAD hardware technologies. Next generation CAD systems are anticipated to be built upon a virtual 3D platform, featuring a greatly enhanced interactive design environment. This virtual reality based CAD system has the potential to work with designers as a computerized design assistant and is able to carry out advanced design modeling operations not readily available today. In particular, existing CAD software technologies have been based on a geometric modeling scheme of a rigid algebraic structure, which is known to be deficient in supporting human creativity. The proposed research program aims at developing a new geometric modeling scheme which will form the basis to create and modify a CAD model according to the designer's creative thinking process rather than the tedious and incremental modeling steps required by current CAD systems. Facilitation of the designer's creativity in the CAD modeling environment will be realized via advanced geometric modeling tools that mimic the human cognitive design process.