Opérations booléennes : trente années d'un algorithme toujours au coeur des systèmes de CAO

This paper reviews the kind of algorithms dedicated to Boolean operations on boundary representations whatever the types of operands involved in: polyhedral objects, non-planar surfaces objects, feature-based objects or non-manifold objects. It shows that, for most methods, three stages are necessary: cutting, classification and fusion. Their progress essentially depends on robustness linked to intersection computations. The paper focuses then on methods giving a robust and reliable algorithms. Unfortunately, despite well-known advances in exact arithmetic, and despite reliable system like ESOLID, Boolean operations are still numerically sensible and easily failed.