Collaboration
     & Interoperability
                            Congress - May 3-5, 2010

Horst was a session organizer (“CAD Manufacturing Interoperability”) and a panel discussion moderator (“I Want My PMI! But How Do I Use It and Benefit From It?”) at CIC09.  He also served throughout 2008 on the conference advisory board.  Even though CIC09 was held during challenging economic times, severely restricting travel, among other things, the conference attendance numbers were close to those in years past, and it appeared that the appropriateness and experience of attendees and speakers were as good as or better than before.  This is surely in part due to the aptness of David Prawel, Longview Associates, as conference organizer.

Associated geometry and GD&T in Adobe Acrobat 3D PDF files

Up until very recently, major CAD vendors have resisted allowing access to their “associated GD&T,” meaning computer-readable access to dimensions and tolerances associated to part geometry and features.  At CIC09, Boeing Rotorcraft reported on their response to this stalemate.  Working with Adobe, Boeing Rotorcraft developed a new 3D PDF file which associates GD&T with 3D geometry (versus with 2D drawings).  The file containing the geometry and associated GD&T (and some other important information) was capable of display in the common and freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader (a new version of Adobe Acrobat 3D Extended is needed to generate this file).  The information in this file is intended for consumption by humans only, particularly suppliers who use it to help make a bid for the manufacture of the part (or assembly) described in the 3D PDF file.  It was later uncovered that the associated GD&T in the PDF file was effectively just “decoration” (i.e., in vector-graphics format) and therefore was not (easily) readable by any software application intended to utilize part geometry and GD&T to create manufacturing or measurement process plans.

Another Boeing worker on the new 787 jet claimed the porting of PMI-type (Product Manufacturing Information) along with part geometry in his process was also used only for human (machinist) consumption, and was not used in his process by some software to automatically generate a process plan.

Horst argued that at least in the dimensional measurement domain, planning software is very ready to receive CAD + PMI to generate measurement process plans at least semi-automatically.

Increased interest in design information standards

There was increased interest and importance given to STEP 203e2 in several talks due to the need for long-term archiving (particularly in aerospace/defense), the support from aerospace-centric groups, the cost and frustration with CAD vendors, recognition of the difficulty of native CAD only requirements by OEMs as pushing the problem onto suppliers.  A speaker from an aerospace tier supplier, Parker-Hannifin, clearly revealed that Parker had interoperability problems due to the various native-CAD requirements of their vendors.

Corporate acquisition shown be costly vis-à-vis interoperability

Corporate acquisitions/mergers are costly from the standpoint of interoperability, since such acquisitions invariably introduce “non-standard” information exchange formats into the enterprise, destroying interoperability, unless something costly is done to ensure interoperability again.  This claim was given flesh-and-blood reality, when at CIC09 a speaker from Black and Decker revealed that a recent acquisition of a couple of new companies completely upset Black and Decker’s enterprise-wide requirement of a single PLM/PDM software vendor, requiring they plan and commence a hugely expensive and challenging effort (now several years into the effort) to switch over to a new PLM/PDM vendor’s software products.  If interface standards in the PLM/PDM software domain were supported and implemented at companies like B&G, there would be less cost in the switch over to the new vendor, but this concept was completely absent from the discussion.

Metrics for cost of information exchange incompatibility proposed

A researcher, Nathan Hartman, from Purdue University presented a loosely organized cornucopia of metrics for computing the cost of information exchange incompatibility problems.  Horst has spoken with Prof Hartman and discussed 1) refining and organizing the proposed metrics adding metric that Horst and industry colleagues have identified and 2) seeking to apply these metrics to real industrial environments.

CAD-Manufacturing Interoperability session

In introduction to a session titled, CAD-Manufacturing Interoperability, Horst presented the interface language standards approach and the best solution to the interoperability problem, with the proviso that standards must be done according to certain inviolable rules, if the standards effort is to actually succeed and provide real interoperability.    Simon Frechette (NIST) presented the concept of Model-Based Design (MBD) and the standards effort NIST and the DOD are involved in to ensure information quality in an MBD.