Design and engineering process integration through a multiple view intermediate modeller in a distributed object-oriented system environment

Abstract Feature-based modelling is the emerging technology to integrate design and engineering activities. It enriches product data representation with semantic information, that allows more efficient and direct communication between engineering processes. Nevertheless, major industrial problems arise from the fact that the communication between these processes is still not based on sharing the same information within a computer-internal product model. The lack of industrial product data exchange between various CAD/CAE applications is owing to the fact that there are diverse data formats and standards, giving rise to conversion problems. The ISO standard STEP provides a unique, comprehensive technology to solve most of the industrial problems in data exchange. However, it still does not provide all the resources needed to achieve a high-level, semantic data communication between engineering processes. In this article, we propose a solution to link the design process (CAD) with downstream engineering processes (CAE) based on an integrated feature-based modelling approach that supports both design-by-features and feature recognition. Integration is thereby achieved through a homogeneous, multiple view feature-based representation of the part model, called intermediate model, which is shared among the various applications. 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 intermediate model and are able to extract their specific view from the semantic data of the product. A prototype implementation of the integrated feature-based modelling kernel and its integration into the distributed environment is also outlined.