Abstract
The derivation of product features and assembly process characteristics from CAD data is typically manually performed by experienced design engineers. This paper presents an approach for systematic feature detection from CAD data with identification of a product liaison matrix and the corresponding assembly sequence. The results are stored in AutomationML exchange file format to be used in the subsequent step of automatic workplace design based on the idea of optimized resource to process allocation by heuristic search. The approach is demonstrated and validated using an application example of three different lot size scenarios.