Development of a Design Information Sharing System Using Network and STEP

네트워크와 STEP 표준을 이용한 설계 정보 공유 시스템의 개발

An international standard for the product model data, STEP, and a standard for the distributed object technology, CORBA, will play a very important role in the future manufacturing environment. These two technologies provide background for the sharing of product data and the integration of applications on the network. This paper describes a prototype CAD/CAE environment that is integrated on the network by STEP and CORBA. Several application servers and client software were developed to verify the proposed concept. The present CAD/CAE environments are composed of several individual software components which are not tightly integrated. They also do not utilize the rapidly expanding network and object technologies for the collaboration in the product design process. In the design process in a large organization, sharing of application resources, design data and analysis data through the network will greatly enhance the productivity. The integration between applications can be supported by two key technologies, CORBA(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and STEP(Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Bata). The CORBA provides interoperability between applications on different machines in heterogeneous distributed environments and seamlessly interconnects distributed object systems. Moreover, if all the data in the CAD/CAE environment are based on the STEP, then we can exclude all the data conversion problems between the application systems.