True Collaboration Now Possible Through Engineering Portals

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, May, 2000 by Lawrence S. Gould

Engineering design portals provide valuable, inexpensive, readily available solid model translation, simulation, and analysis services right to your Web browser--and across your entire supply chain.

This stuff about the Internet, application service providers (ASP), portals, and e-commerce is getting to the point where (a) hype is matching the idealized reality, (b) the technologies are becoming really useful, and (c) design collaboration across the supply chain is not the disjointed, capital-intensive, and expensive mess it's been in the past.

These observations became self-evident during a three-day trek in mid-March through National Manufacturing Week in Chicago. AM&P wound up cooling its heels at the booths of three computer-aided-whatever (CAx) vendors, each with a desktop computer connected through the Internet to the vendor's latest portal iteration.

Each of these portals are ASP-based marketplaces--essentially the timesharing operations of yesteryear, but now accessible across the Web. In general, you only need a desktop computer with a Web browser and an Internet connection to run the CAx applications remotely. Plus, you typically need to download a small client application, a Web browser plug-in that acts as the front-end to the ASP-based application.

These portal sites, says Christian Kelley, marketing manager of CAE/Test for SDRC (Milford, OH), can be used for "engineering applications in projects or companies where it was previously not cost effective, or to supplement existing in-house software and hardware infrastructure, or to centralize engineering application support and maintenance infrastructure for the supply chain."

Granted, there are still costs. But, continues Kelley, the electronic licensing and on-line payments are "much lower" than purchasing a full license and maintenance/services. Equally important, the portals provide "pay-as-you-go" access to engineering applications, online support, a collaboration environment, and best-practices templates.

Model translation at 3Dshare.com

3Dshare.com (successor to 3Dmodelserver.com), from Spatial Inc. (Boulder, CO), is the very model of a modern major engineering portal. It is also a service within PlanetCAD, which was being fleshed out at the time AM&P saw it.

The 3Dshare.com service is for translating and healing solid model files. It accepts ACIS SAT (v3-6), CATIA (v4.lx and 4.2) , IGES (v1.0-6.0), Pro/ENGINEER (v18-20, input only), and STEP (AP203 CC6, AP214 CC2) solid models. It then attempts to repair or "heal" the models, as well as translates them into CATIA, ICES, SAT, or STEP file formats for easy distribution. (You can select to only translate the files or to translate and heal.)

Behind the scenes, 3Dshare.com removes non-geometric entities, converts the file format to ACIS SAT, identifies and repairs bad topologies, and post processes the model back to its original format for downloading, along with diagnostic log files if desired. Processing time depends on model size and complexity, the Internet connection speed, and the amount of traffic at 3Dshare.com. Concise, clean Web pages prompt you through and document every step in the process.

One user, Wood-bridge Group, a major supplier of car seat and energy management foam for vehicles, receives a couple of hundred solid model files a month from its customers. Interoperability of those models has always been troublesome; however, Wood-bridge finds that 75% of the models uploaded to 3Dshare.com come back at least 95% healed. Therein lies a reality. "Model translation and healing is as much an art as a science," points out Michael Hansen, Spatial's vice president of PlanetCAD Site Production. But the service does save you money by substantially reducing the laborious, time-consuming manual process of repairing 3D models. And if you don't like the results, 3Dshare.com comes with a 100% money-back guarantee!

Regarding pricing, the minimum fee for healing a model is $5. Fees are based on how much of your model the service can repair. It determines the percent of "good geometry" (including all geometry elements, such as vertices, lines, splines, and surfaces) before and after processing your solid model file. "Good" quality is based on a precision of [10.sup.-6] for distances between edges, faces, and so on. The before and after percentages are then multiplied by a price per megabyte. Figure on $20 to $40 per healed megabyte.

PlanetCAD will be rolled out in phases. The first phase includes the 3Dshare.com service; subsequent phases, expected to be live by July, will include:

* 3Dpublish.com provides technical publishing services, producing CGM, GIF, TIFF, and other such 2D and 3D file formats of your 3D models. This is useful for archival, demonstration, documentation, and marketing purposes.

* Bits2Parts.com is a rapid-prototyping service that, for starters, automates the request-for-proposal (REP) process to locate rapid prototyping suppliers and delivers stereolithography files to those suppliers.

* The Secure Route (code name) service routes and manages product data from your site to internal and external parties throughout your supply chain--across the Internet. The service will eventually provide ANX-level security.