FORFLOW

BAVARIAN RESEARCH ASSOCIATION FOR PROCESS- AND WORKFLOW SUPPORT FOR PLANNING AND CONTROLLING PROCEDURES IN THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

1.2 - Systematic Integration of CAx tools in the product development process

Field of work:

During the process of product development various tools like CAD systems, finite element analysis, manufacturing simulations or artificial intelligence research may be applied. The usage of these programs depends on the actual specifications of the product. This project deals with the needs and issues of CAx data interoperability encountered during the development of innovative products. The inevitable loss of data is to be reduced significantly by establishing distinct definitions of the data contents and formats required. After the evaluation of the simulation tools essential to the processes the available data transfer capabilities of the software packages and the functional range and performance of the data formats will be analysed. As a result the standard data interfaces of the Process Navigator (PN) can be defined and implemented into the holistic approach of the PN. This has to be performed on an effective level of granularity using wrappers and mediators. The benchmark tests developed and applied in this project have to be able to provide a developer with data formats needed according to the step of development carried out. One of the issues faced in this project is the fact that not every company is equipped with recent releases of CAx software packages. Especially small and medium sized businesses quote both financial reasons and expenditure of time for this fact. The Schwede Maschinenbau GmbH, partner of this project, uses Pro/ ENGINEER version 2000i by PTC (four subsequent versions have been released). As a result of this, they have to cope with problems when exchanging data with partners and customers, because of a lack of modern data formats (e.g. Parasolid). These issues should be eliminated with the Process Navigator.