Software Engineering Institute

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, is a powerful medium to use to prototype and design objects. However, current tools for fabrication do not take advantage of basic concepts such as modularity and abstraction that have made it possible to develop highly complex and re-usable software systems and tools. We propose the Parameterizable, Abstractions of Reusable Things (PARTs) Framework, a parallel to object-oriented software classes, to support the validation and integration of 3D models using a combination of geometry and logic.