Interoperability among CAD/CAM/CAE Systems: A Review of Current Research Trends

Interoperability among CAD/CAM/CAE systems is a well known problem in product design and development. At present geometrical data exchange among different software packages is usually carried out through neutral file formats (IGES or STEP) or through proprietary formats. Data exchange processes are usually afflicted by several problems, such as: information loss, redundancy, one-way data exchange and static data exchange. These drawbacks do not permit a really geometric-centric design, and even if the model is transmitted without loss of information, the exchanged data do not incorporate details such as sketches, constraints and features, which represent the designer’s intent. As a result, the model can hardly be modified, and the original intent of the designer may be misunderstood. During the last five years various solutions have been proposed to solve the above mentioned problems. The aim of this work is to investigate and discuss recent research trends in this topic.