Erik J. Johnson, Michael M. Marefat
One weakness within computer integrated manufacturing is an inability to effectively and efficiently model, reason, and make inferences about three-dimensional space. In this paper, we propose a qualitative model of x component according to its features to overcome this weakness. This model consists of two key ideas: (i) the model treats features qualitatively i.e. independent of size, orientation, and global position, and (ii) the model mathematically represents the spatial relationships among the features. The advantage of such a model will be its ability to reason about space in order to solve problems within the manufacturing processes. In addition to presenting the model, in this paper we will provide an example reasoning task of the model to find the multiple interpretations of a component.