On transferring and sharing design intent using STEP methodology

Abstract

The globalisation of the market has increased competition, requiring a reduction in time-to-market for the developments of new products. Thus, the need to integrate and share information among different systems which are involved in the product development process, becomes an important requirement. Many have been the standards that support the data exchange, but all of them are mainly devoted to sharing geometric information. Only STEP (Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data ISO 10303) deals with a more ambitious goal to transfer complete information related to the product development process. Furthermore, the evolution of CAD systems, from geometric modellers towards parametric and feature-based systems, has pointed out the lack of consideration of these new types of data (e.g. parameters, constraints, rules) in the existing standards. In this context, the ENGEN Project is an example of research activity for studying how to overcome such a limit in adopting the STEP architecture and methodology. This paper describes the neutral model, proposed in ENGEN, for representing some conceptual design information of a product in the STEP framework. Such a model is able to capture key aspects of design intent in addition to the shape representation. Furthermore, a description of the processors developed and their pilot demonstration are given, pointing out the critical issues that have been solved in the project, and those that are still open to further efforts in technology research.