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Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM) has become a promising option for fabricating highly customized Aerospace & Defense (A&D) parts as it provides great design flexibility with superior performances. However, due to such design flexibility, it is challenging to identify export regulation compliances of A&D parts, which leads to the potential infiltration of intellectual properties. In the context, the objective of this work is to develop a classification framework to identify the export regulation compliance of AM parts. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to extract export rules from textual regulations, and then converts AM part designs (i.e., CAD models) into the voxel models to apply the extracted rules for identifying export regulation compliance. For a case study, we extracted export rules from a publicly available document and demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed framework by identifying export regulation compliance of sample turbine blade designs. This work demonstrates the development of a general framework, which can be customized as per the target part to be examined, thus contribute to preventing the potential infiltration of intellectual properties. Also, this work can be extended to predict compliance to different types of regulations, such as environmental regulations or medical device regulations.
Keywords
Rule extraction, Additive manufacturing, Export regulation, Natural language processing, Domain ontology.
1.Introduction
Additive Manufacturing (AM) has become a promising option for fabricating highly customized Aerospace & Defense (A&D) parts as it provides more design flexibility with superior performances. For example, it has broadly demonstrated its effectiveness by introducing highly customized A&D parts with complex geometry, such as bracket and turbine blade [1]-[2]. However, due to such design flexibility, it is challenging to identify export regulation compliances of A&D parts, which leads to the unintentional exportation of sensitive design information. A motivating example is the export regulations regarding gas turbine blade design shown in Figure 1, which can be found in the publicly available Commerce Control List (CCL). Specifically, CCL provides a list of items that merit particular attention in exportation, because they could potentially have a military use in addition to a commercial use.
In other words, while a gas turbine blade requires highly customized complex geometry, which can benefit from AM, its design should be carefully reviewed to prevent the violation of export...