Engineers' CAx education—it's not only CAD

Abstract

The general product development can be divided into three phases: creative, conceptual and engineering phase. All phases of the complete life cycle of a product are supported by various IT-systems often called ‘CAx’ 1 1 CAx: Summarised CAD, CAM, CAS, CAQ, -systems. Therefore CAD-education should be extended to ‘CAx-education’ and pay attention to all phases of the life cycle. When looking at today's process chain many different jobs related to CAx can be identified. All of them require different levels of knowledge about subjects like information technology, design procedures or CAGD 2 2 CAGD: Computer Aided Geometric Design -functionalities. The methods to teach those subjects vary from simple autodidactic, via computer supported training methods to interactive person to person training. In industry, the training methods are primarily depending on the company's size and branch. The bigger the company is, the more complex are the training methods and the more specialized is the CAx-education. Enterprises specialised on CAx-training but also in-house education departments are concerned. Other possibilities for CAx-education are internships, technical colleges and universities. All of those suffer from the complexity of the subject and result often in broad but superficial education. Apart from knowledge about CAx-systems and their usage, the students have to learn also about the organisation of the CAx-process and its structures including the cooperation of enterprises. Following these experiences the students or employees will at first be trained in fundamental CAS/CAD/CAM. In a second step they will attend special courses for PDM, Data exchange, FEM, or others. On higher level there will be courses dealing with PLM 3 3 PDM: Product Data Management, PLM: Product Lifecycle Management , process- and company networks, with future trends and techniques. During the whole education the application aspect has to be dominant.