STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION OF MACHINE-TOOLS .2. EVALUATION OF STRUCTURAL SIMILARITY

To establish a design methodology for the real modular construction of machine tools, a method of structural description, by which the machine tool can be represented with the structural pattern, was proposed in the first report. As the next step, in this report, the evaluation method for the similarity of structural pattern has been investigated. Choosing the necessarY informations from the structural pattern, the similaritY in terms of 'rate of commonness' has been computed for various kinds of machine tools, and the computed results of evaluation have also been compared with designer's intuition, which has been used in the designing procedure of machine tools to give a concept of deciding the similar structure.