ALADDIN
CENTER Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon Computer Science DepartmentSchool of Computer Science
PROBES
Meshing, Theory and Applications
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Meshing is the task of partitioning a spatial domain into simple geometric elements such as triangles (in 2D) or tetrahedrons (in 3D). Meshes typically have to conform to boundaries. Furthermore, for many applications there are quality criteria that need to be met, such as ensuring that angles are not too small. Meshing is a huge industry, with dozens of companies selling meshing software, hundreds of companies using software, and a diverse set of applications, including graphics, geographic information systems, computer vision, and air flow and structural simulations.

In the past decade there have been many important theoretical advances in algorithm design for meshing related problems, but only some of these have made it into meshing software. The goal of this PROBE is to build a stronger link between the theory and practice of meshing. The hope is both for the algorithms community to better understand the needs of applications and for applications community to more rapidly integrate algorithmic ideas into their software.

Towards this end it is important to develop a shared infrastructure that the algorithms community can use to make it easier to prototype code for their ideas. It is also important to involve application users in the problem definitions. The infrastructure should include shared code, shared problem instances, and documented file formats for representing various geometric structures. Interesting research issues arise in deciding what some of the shared interfaces should be. For examples, how should curves surfaces be represented. Also, it is exactly in these definitions where it is important to involve the application developers.

The Meshing Infrastructure Workshop, Ithaca, New York, September 18, 2002

 

This material is based upon work supported by National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0122581.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation