Dries Benoit

Matteo Ballegeer, Toon Van Camp, Willem Jaspers et al.

Graph-based machine learning has emerged as a promising approach for manufacturability analysis by learning directly from CAD models represented as Boundary Representations (B-reps), exploiting both surface geometry and topological connectivity. However, purely geometric representations often lack the process-specific semantics required for accurate manufacturability prediction: many manufacturing factors, such as surface roles or bend intent, are not explicitly encoded in shape alone and are difficult for data-driven models to infer reliably. We propose a hybrid approach that addresses this challenge by enriching B-rep attributed adjacency graphs with manufacturing features recognized through a rule-based module. Applied to sheet metal bending, recognized features, such as bend characteristics, flange lengths, and surface roles are integrated as node attributes, concentrating the learning signal on process-relevant geometric patterns. Experiments on both a large-scale synthetic manufacturability benchmark and a real-world industrial dataset with measured bending times, one of the first such validations on genuine production data, demonstrate that combining domain knowledge with graph-based learning improves prediction accuracy across both tasks. The results demonstrate that hybrid modeling offers a feasible and effective path toward deployable tools for manufacturability assessment and effort estimation in industrial CAD environments.

Matteo Ballegeer, Dries F. Benoit

Predicting the manufacturability of CAD designs early, in terms of both feasibility and required effort, is a key goal of Design for Manufacturing (DFM). Despite advances in deep learning for CAD and its widespread use in manufacturing process selection, learning-based approaches for predicting manufacturability within a specific process remain limited. Two key challenges limit progress: inconsistency across prior work in how manufacturability is defined and consequently in the associated learning targets, and a scarcity of suitable datasets. Existing labels vary significantly: they may reflect intrinsic design constraints or depend on specific manufacturing capabilities (such as available tools), and they range from discrete feasibility checks to continuous complexity measures. Furthermore, industrial datasets typically contain only manufacturable parts, offering little signal for infeasible cases, while existing synthetic datasets focus on simple geometries and subtractive processes. To address these gaps, we propose a taxonomy of manufacturability metrics along the axes of configuration dependence and measurement type, allowing clearer scoping of generalizability and learning objectives. Next, we introduce BenDFM, the first synthetic dataset for manufacturability assessment in sheet metal bending. BenDFM contains 20,000 parts, both manufacturable and unmanufacturable, generated with process-aware bending simulations, providing both folded and unfolded geometries and multiple manufacturability labels across the taxonomy, enabling systematic study of previously unexplored learning-based DFM challenges. We benchmark two state-of-the-art 3D learning architectures on BenDFM, showing that graph-based representations that capture relationships between part surfaces achieve better accuracy, and that predicting metrics that depend on specific manufacturing setups remains more challenging.

Matteo Ballegeer, Dries F. Benoit

Learning directly from boundary representations (B-reps) has significantly advanced 3D CAD analysis. However, state-of-the-art B-rep learning methods rely on absolute coordinates and normals to encode global context, making them highly sensitive to rotations. Our experiments reveal that models achieving over 95% accuracy on aligned benchmarks can collapse to as low as 10% under arbitrary $\mathbf{SO}(3)$ rotations. To address this, we introduce FoV-Net, the first B-rep learning framework that captures both local surface geometry and global structural context in a rotation-invariant manner. Each face is represented by a Local Reference Frame (LRF) UV-grid that encodes its local surface geometry, and by Field-of-View (FoV) grids that capture the surrounding 3D context by casting rays and recording intersections with neighboring faces. Lightweight CNNs extract per-face features, which are propagated over the B-rep graph using a graph attention network. FoV-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on B-rep classification and segmentation benchmarks, demonstrating robustness to arbitrary rotations while also requiring less training data to achieve strong results.