Skeletons for Representation and Reasoning in Engineering Applications

Skeletal transforms (of which the Medial Axis Transform (MAT) is the most popular) have been proposed in the literature as a useful shape abstraction tool. This paper develops this proposition with a description of the areas where skeletons (and the MAT in particular) could serve as an enabling representation of part geometry. The paper then addresses two issues that need to be resolved for the application of skeletons in the area of engineering analysis, numerical simulation-based analysis of design in particular. These are the generation of skeletal transforms for complex 2D and 3D geometries, and quadrilateral mesh generation. Generation of the midsurface abstraction of 3D objects (which is a skeleton with MAT like properties) and MAT for 2D closed regions is then described. The paper then presents an algorithm for 2D quadrilateral mesh generation based on the MAT. The paper concludes with a discussion of the outstanding issues in the use of skeletons/MAT in design and engineering applications