2. Goals

FEMEX is intended to be an international and interdisciplinary group of experts in the area of feature-based modeling. The primary goal of FEMEX is to provide a broad theoretical, conceptual and practical background for the development and evaluation of a new generation of tools and systems for feature-based product development.

FEMEX will focus on activities such as the analysis of different existing approaches for feature-based modeling, and the development of a concept for an optimized feature-based modeling environment. It is important that all participants from universities, research institutes, commercial companies and industrial users participate in an equal way (Figure 2). Herewith, it will be possible to build a sound foundation for computer-aided support of the product development and for improvement of production using the feature modeling paradigm. The results of the FEMEX group can also be used for supporting the international standardization work in product modeling.

The purpose of FEMEX in the promotion of methods and tools for computer-aided support of feature modeling in different phases of the product life cycle, such as design, process planning, manufacturing and assembling.

To satisfy these requirements, the following activities are within the scope of FEMEX:

• Organization of regular meetings
  FEMEX is organized as a forum for information exchange between industrial users, commercial suppliers and researchers whereby all will take advantages of the common results
• Establishment of strategic goals
  A strategic goal of FEMEX will be the development of a common concept for the support of product development through feature-information technology
• Identification of application areas
  In FEMEX practical-oriented examples will be provided.
• Seminars and workshops
  The actual state of the art in feature-based modeling will be followed by studying the latest results and publishedd in reports and papers.
• Common publications
  The results reached in FEMEX will be published in reports and papers.
• Cooperation in national and international standardization committees
  Members of FEMEX will actively contribute to national and international standardization committees.
• Acquisition of new projects
  The activities of FEMEX form the basis of consortia for common project proposals (EG,BMFT,DFG).

3. Membership

Members of the FEMEX working group can be persons from industrial users, system suppliers, and researchers from universities and institutes. Active participation is mandatory.

---