Proceedings of IDETC/CIE 2005 2005 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference Long Beach, California, USA, September 24-28, 2005 DETC2005-85462 INTEGRATING MULTIPLE ENGINEERING RESOURCES IN A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR REVERSE ENGINEERING LEGACY MECHANICAL PARTS Suraj R. Musuvathy, David E. Johnson, H. James de St. Germain, Elaine Cohen, Chimiao Xu, Richard F. Riesenfeld, Thomas C. Henderson School of Computing University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 Email: srm, dejohnso, germain, cohen, xu, rfr, tch @cs.utah.edu ABSTRACT Reverse engineering is a time-consuming and technically formidable process that is increasingly becoming an economic imperative due to replacement costs. The Multiple Engineering Resources aGent Environment (MERGE) system, introduced in this paper, is a new approach toward reverse engineering whose architecture and modules are driven specifically by the require- ments of legacy engineering. Legacy engineering scenarios pre- sume availability of multiple (possibly incomplete or inconsis- tent) sources of information, lack of digital descriptions of the parts, constrained time restrictions and need for significant do- main knowledge expertise. The reverse engineering process must yield modern CAD models capable of driving state-of-the art CAM processes. The MERGE system aims at making the re- verse engineering process more effective, using both intuitive in- teraction and visualization as key components, by enabling quick identification and resolution of inconsistencies among various re- sources in a unified environment. The MERGE system also aims at simplifying the reverse engineering process by integrating var- ious computational agents to assist the reverse engineer in pro- cessing information and in creating the desired CAD models. INTRODUCTION Partly because of its complex, multifarious nature, reverse engineering is a time consuming, technically formidable pro- Figure 1. User interacting with the MERGE system. cess that is increasingly becoming an economic imperative be- cause replacement costs of the entire original systems 1 are too high. Thus we are faced with a significant engineering chal- lenge, since modern CAD/CAM systems are primarily conceived for ab initio design engineering, and give rather weak inciden- tal support to reverse engineering. Our system specifically ad- dresses the legacy engineering form of reverse engineering, i.e., 1 Boeing 707 aircrafts, developed in the early 1950s, are still in service to date even though production was stopped in 1978 [1]. 1 Copyright c 2005 by ASME