General Goal

The final goal of this project is to build a development infrastructure for industrial applications - a Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing and Computer Aided Engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) middleware -, based on standards, and available in open source.

As 3D-Workbench will be based on standards, it makes up a solution for developing CAD/CAM/CAE specific applications independent to major generic CAD systems, and interoperable with them in a distributed environment, providing that these CAD systems implement those standards.

Direct users of 3D-Workbench will be :

• Industrial companies developing dedicated industrial applications for their internal use, whatever the way they develop, using their internal resources or software developers subcontractors.

  Example of such companies are (in France) EADS Aerospatiale, Renault, Usinor, (in Norway) Der Norske Veritas, Norsk Hydro, Konsberg Defence and Aerospace, (in Belgium) SABCA, SONACA, (in Italy) RINA.

• Software services companies basing their offer - consulting, support and specific development of industrial applications - on 3D-Workbench.

  Example of such companies are (in France) Open CASCADE, (in Norway) Systems in Motion, 5X, (in Belgium) Si-Lab.

• Software vendors in the CAD/CAM/CAE area.

Example of such companies are (in France) ESI, CNI, (in Belgium) Samtech, FFT.

• Universities needing a platform in order to demonstrate and disseminate their results in the CAD/CAM/CAE research area.

Example of such universities are (in France) ENSAM, (in Norway) NTNU, Narvik University College, (in Belgium) University of Liege, (in Germany) UPK Karlsruhe, IFW Hannover, (in Italy) Parme.

Given that the acceptation of this platform will depend on the standardisation of components it is made up, this project :

• includes participation to task forces answering to Request For Proposal (RFP) from the Object Management Group (OMG, the first international organisation for standardising software) - as such, Open CASCADE SA is member of OMG currently working on the CAD Services proposal,
• bases its architecture on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and its Interface Definition Language (IDL).

Also included in 3D-Workbench is a Rapid Application Development environment (RAD) consisting of :

• A ready-to-use application, also called 3D-Workbench, for experimenting with this middleware, demonstrating its components and prototyping new applications based on them - as the 3D-Workbench application is open source, it shows how to use the CAD/CAM/CAE components and provides a starting implementation of any application user interface.
• A development environment providing tools for managing workspaces connected to a source code control system and dedicated to development of new CAD/CAM/CAE added value components.

The diagram below illustrates the entire content and positioning of the 3D-Workench product - the project proposed in this document is a subset of this - in which :

• Two components are already standardised by OMG - PDM Enablers - or other organisations - IGES and STEP data exchange formats
• One component is currently under specification - CAD Services
• Two components have been presented to OMG to be candidate for future RFPs in bounds of OMG Manufacturing Domain Task Force (MfgDTF) roadmap - Design Algorithms and 3D Visualisation (first feed-back has been positive)
• Other components are expected to be standardised later

This diagram also shows that :

• Many implementations of some components may exist - for example, both SDRC and Unigraphics have also published their intention to implement CAD Services
• End-user applications based on this middleware are interoperable

Fig. 1: General goal of the project

Contents of the project

The 3D-Workbench proposed project includes the following 5 components only :

• CAD Services
• A first lot of Design and Simulation Algorithms
• 3D Visualisation
• The 3D-Workbench RAD

Other CAE components required by this project (CAE Services and additional Simulation Algorithms) will come from the Salomé French RNTL project, thanks to the synergy between the two projects - Salomé should also benefit from 3D-Workbench, particularly from CAD Services.

Although 3D-Workbench targets Data Sharing, eventually through the use of PDM Enablers, it also will include existing implementation of Data Exchange component.

Components in the CAM domain are expected in the future.

As 3D-Workbench will be the first open source implementation of this CAD/CAM/CAE middleware, it is developed using currently available open source libraries such as :

• Open CASCADE for the geometry and topology,
• FEMTOWN for simulation algorithms (open source availability is expected year 2004),
• Coin3d for the visualization,
• Qt for the user interface (open source on Linux only),
• MICO (to be validated during the first workpackage specification) as the default CORBA support - the intent is to be CORBA implementation independent.

Although 3D-Workbench will also run on Windows and all major Unix platforms, the intention is to disseminate it through Linux distributions.

Fig. 2: Contents of the project

The above diagrams are also available in PowerPoint format.

Sub-project decomposition

3D-Workbench is structured into 7 sub-projects :

1. Architecture

2. 3D Workbench

3. CAD Services

4. Design Algorithms

5. Simulation Algorithms

6. 3D Visualisation Services

7. Promotion and Packaging

To be continued.