DESIGN AND ENGINEERING PROCESS INTEGRATION THROUGH A MULTIPLE VIEW INTERMEDIATE MODELER IN A DISTRIBUTED OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEM ENVIRONMENT

Feature-based modelling is the emerging technology to integrate design and engineering activities. It enriches product data representation w ith semantic information, that allows more efficient and direct commun ication between engineering processes. Nevertheless, major industrial problems arise from the fact that the communication between these proc esses is still not based on sharing the same information within a comp uter-internal product model. The lack of industrial product data excha nge between various CAD/CAE applications is owing to the fact that the re are diverse data formats and standards, giving rise to conversion p roblems. The ISO standard STEP provides a unique, comprehensive techno logy to solve most of the industrial problems in data exchange. Howeve r, it still does not provide all the resources needed to achieve a hig h-level, semantic data communication between engineering processes.In this article, we propose a solution to link the design process (CAD) w ith downstream engineering processes (CAE) based on an integrated feat ure-based modelling approach that supports both design-by-features and feature recognition. Integration is thereby achieved through a homoge neous, multiple view feature-based representation of the part model, c alled intermediate model, which is shared among the various applicatio ns.A distributed, object-oriented feature-based system architecture is described. Herein, the intermediate modeller server acts as a service provider to network-based distributed applications. These share the i ntermediate model and are able to extract their specific view from the semantic data of the product. A prototype implementation of the integ rated feature-based modelling kernel and its integration into the dist ributed environment is also outlined. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.