Integration of CAD/CAM/CAE in Product Development System Using STEP/XML

Abstract

Everyday the companies make strategic business decisions to improve their position in the market. They examine the business value chain to improve the product innovation, customer intimacy, and operational efficiency. Product development is one of the key weapons in the war for a competitive advantage. Policy in product development is in the form of five ‘rights’, viz. the right information, in the right format, for the right people, in the right location, and at the right time. The design and development of the product in small-scale and large-scale industries are managed with CAD/CAM/CAE systems. All the systems are heterogeneous. The Standard for the Exchange of Product (STEP) model data [1] is used as the standard format for models created in the CAD/CAM/CAE systems. In this research, an interface program to communicate the product data in the client/server environment has been developed. The interface program converts the STEP file into an XML file. The XML format is the lightweight web-based communication format. With a properly secured web page communication for different users in the enterprise, the authors achieve the concurrent engineering environment throughout the product life cycle