AN APPROACH TO IMPROVE THE RELIABILITY OF BOOLEAN OPERATION ON A PAIR OF POLYHEDRA

Abstract

It is essential and pressing to improve reliability of Boolean operations in geometric modelling systems. The Boolean operations in commercial systems now available are not reliable enough because of numerical calculation errors. Numerical calculation errors hinder us from determining set membership classifications exactly. Some classifications are ambiguous because they are dependent on adopted computing tolerance. Thereby interrelated classifications may conflict with each other and it is very difficult to get correct results of Boolean operations In many cases. We introduce a reliable Boolean operation algorithm which solves the conflicts among interrelated classifications before implementation of Boolean operation by use of reasoning technique. The algorithm has replaced the modelling module of the geometric modelling system GENS 2.0 to form a new system GENS 2.1 on Apollo and Sun workstations. According to tests and compared with Geomod 3.9 and I/ENS, GENS 2.1 is much more reliable.