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。 大量增加的设计活动对几十年前的计算机辅助设计（CAD）软件技术施加了巨大的压力，以跟上CAD硬件技术的发展。 下一代CAD系统预计将建立在虚拟3D平台上，具有大大增强的交互式设计环境。 这种基于虚拟现实的CAD系统有可能与设计师一起工作，作为计算机化的设计助手，并能够进行先进的设计建模操作，今天还没有。 特别地，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，已知该方案在支持人类创造力方面是不足的。 拟议的研究计划的目的是开发一个新的几何造型方案，这将形成的基础上创建和修改CAD模型，根据设计师的创造性思维过程，而不是繁琐和增量建模步骤所需的当前CAD系统。 通过模拟人类认知设计过程的先进几何建模工具，将促进设计师在CAD建模环境中的创造力。

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.