It has been widely reported that the reuse of previously created components, or features, in new engineering designs will improve the efficiency of a company’s product development process. Although the reuse of engineering components has established metrics and methodologies, the reuse of specific design features (e.g. stiffening ribs, hole patterns or lubrication grooves, etc.) has received less attention in the literature. Typically, researchers have reported approaches to partial design reuse that identify patterns predominately in terms of geometrically similar shapes (i.e. a set of features) whose elements are adjacent, cohesive, and decoupled from the overall form of a component.

In contrast, this paper defines a common design structure (CDS) as collections of frequently occurring features (e.g. holes) with common parametric values (e.g. diameters) in a CAD database (irrespective of their locations or spatial connectivity between other features on a component). By exploiting the established data-mining technology of association rules and item-sets the authors show how CDSs can be efficiently computed for hundreds of 3D CAD models. A case study, with hole data extracted from a publicly available dataset of hydraulic valves, is presented to illustrate how item-sets associated with CDS can be computed and used to support predictive design by identifying potentially ‘substitutable features’ during an interactive design process. This is done using a combination of association rules and geometric compatibility checks to ensure the system’s suggestion are implementable. The use of the Kullback–Leibler divergence to assess the degree of similarity between components is identified as a crucial step in the process of identifying the “best” suggestions. The results illustrate how the prototype implementation successfully mines the CDSs and identifies substitutable hole features in a dataset of industrial valve designs.

据广泛报道，在新的工程设计中重用先前创建的组件或功能将提高公司产品开发流程的效率。尽管工程组件的重复使用已经建立了度量标准和方法，但是特定设计功能（例如加劲肋，孔型或润滑槽等）的重复使用在文献中受到的关注较少。通常，研究人员已经报告了部分设计重用的方法，这些方法主要根据几何相似的形状（即一组特征）来识别图案，这些形状的元素是相邻的，内聚的并且与组件的整体形式分离。

相反，本文将通用设计结构（CDS）定义为在CAD数据库中具有共同参数值（例如直径）的频繁出现的特征（例如孔）的集合（无论它们的位置或组件上其他特征之间的空间连通性） 。通过利用已建立的关联规则和项目集的数据挖掘技术，作者展示了如何为数百个3D CAD模型有效地计算CDS。案例研究从一个公开的液压阀数据集中提取了孔数据，以说明如何在交互式设计过程中通过识别潜在的“可替代特征”来计算与CDS相关的项目集并用于支持预测性设计。这是通过结合关联规则和几何兼容性检查来完成的，以确保系统的建议可实施。在确定“最佳”建议的过程中，使用Kullback-Leibler差异评估组件之间的相似程度是至关重要的一步。结果说明了原型实施如何成功开采CDS并在工业阀门设计数据集中识别可替代的孔特征。