Abstract
Product structures are represented in engineering models by depicting and linking components, features and assemblies. Their understanding requires knowledge of both design and manufacturing practices, and yet further contextual reasoning is needed to read them correctly. Since these representations are essential to the engineering activities, the lack of a clear and explicit semantics of these models hampers the use of information systems for their assessment and exploitation. We study this problem by identifying different interpretations of structure representations, and then discuss the formal properties that a suitable language needs for representing components, features and combinations of these. We show that the representation of components and features require a non-standard mereology.