Step standardized product data representation and exchange for optimized product development and automated process planning

Abstract

Extremely variable customer demands and increasing competition require a fast and efficient product development. Especially the industry for machining parts is forced to give an accurate estimation of costs and delivery time, besides forecasting the feasibility to gain a lead over competitors. STEP provides specialized application protocols (AP) for the integration of application systems from different fields of product development. In our long term research we are going to generate manufacturing variants using genetic algorithms under respect of a virtual factory environment. Therefore we require an application protocol specific interface for the integration of the STEP exchange structure from a physical file into the logical software layer. This paper gives an overview of our model that is fundamental for optimized product development and presents an approach for generating programming language dependent source code from the formal modeling specification language EXPRESS using the example of AP 224 and C#-.NET. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.