CAD model simplification for assembly field

This paper aims to investigate a CAD model simplification method with appearance and assembly feature preservation in order to demonstrate and interact with the virtual assembly process of complex product efficiently. Firstly, the invisible features of current-assembled-state assembly model are detected and removed by pre-rendering the assembly model from multiple view directions to reduce data volume and preserve the appearance. Subsequently, the notion of “conjugation” is incorporated into the definition of assembly features to guide assembly feature recognition. The attributed adjacency graphs (AAGs) of the simplified current-assembled-state assembly model and to-be-assembled components are established. Then, the assembly features on currently selected to-be-assembled component are automatically recognized by searching conjugated subgraphs between the AAG corresponding to currently selected to-be-assembled component and other AAGs based on improved subgraph isomorphism algorithm. After that, simplified CAD model of the to-be-assembled component with its assembly features preserved is constructed by suppressing the common form features, so that it can complete assembly process fluently with the current-assembled-state assembly model. Finally, this method is applied successfully to several cases and the result shows its feasibility and superiority.