Next generation computer-aided design and geometric modeling technologies

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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.