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APRIL 15, 2004
Software That Searches the Parts Bin Purdue University's Karthik Ramani is close to solving a vexing, time-wasting problem for designers and engineers Kids love coloring books with connect-the-dots drawings. But doing just the reverse -- creating patterns of dots that distill the essence of industrial parts -- is what appeals to Karthik Ramani, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University. The software his team is developing promises to make work a lot more fun for adult designers and engineers. Searching engineering databases for a part design with certain features or functions can be a royal pain. At many companies, databases have grown so bloated that designers spend at least six weeks a year hunting for information. Often, they never find it. After a frustrating day or two, they give up and concoct a whole new part from scratch. To facilitate mining the knowledge hiding in databases, Ramani four years ago began hatching a system that can scrutinize existing computer-aided design (CAD) models and find those with desired properties or shapes. ASSIGNING "VOXELS." This "shape-search" software works like a graphics-oriented version of Google, says Ramani. Instead of entering words, a designer can draw a freehand sketch, and the search engine will sift through a database and pull out similar parts. Or the system can be told to take an existing CAD model, perhaps with freehand modifications, and find related designs. It will even be possible to narrow search results by stipulating a cost range or production method -- say, casting vs. machining. First, though, CAD models have to be converted into three-dimensional connect-the-dots images by Ramani's software. In this case, the dots are actually small cubes called voxels (short for volume elements). When that's done, the system uses fancy algorithms to connect the voxels in various ways, yielding so-called feature vectors. A vector is computer-speak for a string of related numbers. Here, each string encodes some specific aspect of a part, such as how many holes it has, where they're located, and their size. All the vectors are then assembled into a table that depicts the part's overall geometry. Finally, vectors and tables get cross-indexed, much like the contents of a book, to expedite searching. Ramani's team is still refining the program's indexing strategy, but the latest prototype has proved 85% accurate in hunting down parts in databases borrowed from companies. The finished software, Ramani predicts, will do better -- and will slash the time that engineers spend digging for data by 80%, especially when searching gargantuan databases. FADED MEMORIES. Manufacturers of office equipment, cars, and consumer products have databases holding many thousands of parts. One commercial jetliner alone, Ramani notes, consists of 1.3 million parts. As engineering teams disband, designers come and go, and managers get promoted, past know-how gradually fades from corporate memory. Reinventing it delays new-product introductions and wastes precious resources and talent. Ramani's shape-search system promises to make it easy to rediscover and reuse previous design investments. The software will be commercialized by Imaginestics, a startup in Purdue's Research Park.  By Otis Port in New York
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