Feature-based modeling of automobile gears and manufacturing resources for virtual manufacturing.

The manufacturability evaluation is an important component of virtual manufacturing and concurrent engineering, and hot spot of this research is focused on manufacturability evaluation based on feature at present. In this paper, using the object-oriented modeling methodology, according to the manufacturing features of the gears used in automobile, the gears are classified into cylindrical gears and bevel gears to carry on the feature modeling separately; the manufacturing resources are classified into the basic information of the manufacturing equipments and the feature processing capability information to establish information models, and the association relationship of features, machine tools, and process equipment is established simultaneously. All of the models established in the article provide the information support for manufacturability evaluation and lay a good foundation for virtual manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]