NC process reuse oriented effective subpart retrieval approach of 3D CAD models

•The association mechanism between medial axis transform (MAT) and NC machining is established to reveal the association between geometry and NC process.•The machining precision and cutting tools filtering for accelerating subpart retrieval is presented to filter out infeasible subparts quickly.•A multilevel feature descriptor capturing various levels of NC process information for reuse is designed.•The matched feature pairs similarity and feature layout information similarity are presented to calculate the similarity between subparts.