Trends in CAD/CAM that will shape the future

Modern Machine Shop, July, 1991 by Stewart D. Siebell

Trends In CAD/CAM That Will Shape The Future

The rest of this decade will see continued advances in techniques for creating and manipulating workpiece geometry. Standards for user interfaces, data transfer, and computer architecture will give users new flexibility. All of these developments promise to have a significant impact on numerical control and other manufacturing applications.

Where are numerical control (NC) and computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) headed? What current trends are influencing the direction these key manufacturing technologies are taking? The answers to these important questions should help us anticipate and plan for the future.

For years, manufacturing companies in the United States have been criticized for a lack of long-range planning. Intense pressures to meet short-term goals are usually blamed for this situation. But another factor has also been at work. Long-range planning means accepting a certain degree of uncertainty. Technology changes so rapidly that it is very difficult to predict what techniques, processes, or systems will predominate or become obsolete.

But decisions about technology are not like dropping an anchor. They are like spreading a sail. Leaders of a manufacturing enterprise must set a course toward a destination, then be ready to shift with the winds.

The following pages are meant to be a breezy review of the major currents blowing us toward the future. They represent the forces that will both guide and propel the decision-making process.

Capture And Share Knowledge

The collective knowledge of individuals within a company is a clear corporate asset. In the 90s, CAD/CAM systems will provide the tools to electronically capture this knowledge and apply it to the design and manufacture of components. Current CAD/CAM technology is related primarily to the dimensional characteristics of a component. However, other properties, such as material, cost, manufacturability, inspectability, assembly fit, tolerances, and so on, are equally important. Design standards, rules, and constraints also impact the design.

Today, manufacturing know-how is mainly locked in the minds of a few individuals at each company. CAD/CAM systems will be extended to capture and utilize this knowledge. This will be accomplished by direct coupling with dedicated knowledge-based engineering systems or by adding that capability to the base CAD/CAM functionality. Knowledge-based engineering will become an integral component of a CAD/CAM system.

New software tools will help these experts record the information and thought processes with which they make decisions. Once captured, these records become readily available to those making the actual design decisions on future projects. These tools will have a major impact on automation of the design and manufacturing process.

Simultaneous Engineering

Sharing information is another urgent issue where new techniques and methodologies will have an impact. One of the most important of these is simultaneous engineering. Simultaneous engineering (or concurrent engineering) can be defined as a methodology in which the design of the product is accomplished simultaneously with the design of the process to produce the product. In this methodology, design engineering works together with manufacturing engineering and other related functions during the design phase to incorporate downstream manufacturing considerations into the product design (Figure 1).

Companies that have implemented simultaneous engineering have typically experienced fewer design changes, shorter lead times, lower manufacturing costs and improved quality.

This concept not only applies within a company, but can be extended to the supplier network. As a company better understands the issues being faced by the supplier, and the supplier offers design suggestions based upon manufacturing knowledge, a more effective process results. The inclusion of suppliers and customers into the manufacturing process creates a "virtual factory." Different companies will work so closely together as a team that it will be as if they were actually a dedicated organization under one roof.

Acceptance of Industry Standards

Proprietary computing systems were commonplace from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. Mainframe- and mini-based systems employed proprietary architectures, operating systems, data managers and data communication networks. Early workstation systems also employed proprietary architectures. Proprietary systems contributed to the "islands of automation" that developed in the 1980s.

In the 1990s, open architectures employing industry standard components will be demanded by users and provided by vendors. Here are some important formal and de facto standards that reflect this trend:

* UNIX has become accepted as the de facto standard operating system for engineering workstations. Although variants of UNIX remain, efforts are underway to move to a common system. * C has become the standard programming language for development of CAD/CAM application systems. Its object-oriented variant, C++, is likely to evolve in the 1990s as a de facto standard as object orientation becomes commonplace. The main concept behind object orientation is that repetitive programming code should be written only once and shared by a number of other programs.