Today’s product development processes rely on Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD) systems that implement a geometric-centered perspective in design. The development of long discussed feature-based MCAD has not yet led to systems that truly support semantic and functional representation of features, which hampers also the use of these models for functional reasoning. This paper investigates the present feature-based MCAD limitations. It illustrates, through simple examples, how to use ontological analysis and feature re-classification to introduce software extensions in existing MCAD that achieve a newer level of semantic representation of features, and enhance the cognitive understanding of the final model. The proposal also shows how to automatically validate these features from the functional viewpoint.

当今的产品开发过程依赖于机械计算机辅助设计（MCAD）系统，该系统在设计中实现了以几何为中心的观点。长期讨论的基于特征的MCAD的开发尚未导致真正支持特征的语义和功能表示的系统，这也妨碍了使用这些模型进行功能推理。本文研究了当前基于特征的MCAD局限性。它通过简单的示例说明了如何使用本体分析和特征重新分类在现有MCAD中引入软件扩展，以实现更高水平的特征语义表示，并增强对最终模型的认知理解。该提案还显示了如何从功能角度自动验证这些功能。