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日益增长的需求。设计活动的大量增加给已有数十年历史的计算机辅助设计(CAD)软件技术带来了巨大的压力，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，具有极大增强的交互设计环境。这种基于虚拟现实的CAD系统具有作为计算机化设计助理与设计师一起工作的潜力，并能够执行目前尚不容易获得的高级设计建模操作。特别是，现有的CAD软件技术一直基于刚性代数结构的几何建模方案，这是已知在支持人类创造力方面的不足。提出的研究计划旨在开发一种新的几何建模方案，该方案将成为根据设计者的创造性思维过程来创建和修改CAD模型的基础，而不是现有CAD系统所需的繁琐和增量的建模步骤。通过模拟人类认知设计过程的先进几何建模工具，将在CAD建模环境中促进设计师的创造力。

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.