In an intelligent CAD environment, manufacturability analysis systems will be interacting with various other software tools. Effectiveness and efficiency of manufacturability analysis will depend on the capability of such supporting tools and nature of interaction between manufacturability analysis systems and other software tools.
In remainder of this section, we describe various software tools that will be used to support manufacturability analysis systems. Section 5.1 reviews some works in functionality representation, Section 5.2 present some discussion on the current research in design understanding, Section 5.3 gives some outline of research in generative process planning and related areas.