Engineering solutions are generally documented in assembly and part drawings and bill of materials. A great benefit, qualitatively
and commercially, can be achieved if these paper based storages can be transformed into digital information archives. The
process of this transformation is called reconstruction. The reconstruction process of paper based assembly drawings consists
of four steps: digitization; vectorization/interpretation; 3D reconstruction of the parts and the 3D reconstruction of the
assembly.
This paper evaluates existing commercial systems worldwide for interpretation of paper based mechanical engineering drawings.
For a complete reconstruction process a 3D reconstruction is needed. This functionality is already supported by some CAD systems
to a certain extent, but it still remains a major topic of research work. One CAD system which converts 2D CAD models into
3D CAD models is presented. Finally, after the reconstruction of the parts the whole assembly can be reconstructed. Until
now, no system for the automatic reconstruction of assemblies is available. In our paper we present a general approach for
automatic reconstruction of 3D assembly model data by interpretation of mechanical engineering 2D assembly drawings, their
part drawings, and the bill of materials.