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According to several literature sources, Product Planning is acknowledged as a primary driver of future commercial success for new designed products, and it is schematically constituted by the identification of business opportunities and the selection of most promising alternatives. Despite the recalled relevance of Product Planning, it emerges that a marginal quantity of companies have adopted formal methods to carry out this task. The paper attempts to provide a major understanding about such a limited implementation of Product Planning techniques and other open issues emerging from the analysis of the literature concerning the initial phases of engineering design cycles. The presented study investigates the claimed benefits of methods described in the literature, the level to which such tools are diffused through educational programs in Technical Institutes, the expectations and the demands of a sample of enterprises with respect to new tools supporting Product Planning. It emerges that, whereas existing methods strive to fulfil relevant properties according to the perception of the companies, limitations come out in terms of the transfer of the proposed techniques and their perceived reliability.

Boolean operation of geometric models is an essential element in computational geometry. An efficient approach is developed in this research to perform Boolean operation for triangulated meshes represented by B-rep. This approach is much fast and robust than many existing methods. The Octree technique is adapted to facilitate the division of the common space of two meshes in order to reduce the time of Octree's construction and intersection detection. Floating point arithmetic errors and singularity of intersections are then analyzed to guarantee the unique intersection between a segment and a face, and the continuity of intersections. A novel technique based on intersecting triangles is finally proposed to create required sub-meshes based on the type of Boolean operations. Some experimental results and comparisons with other methods are presented to prove that the proposed method is fast and robust.

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