CAD Five Years Down the Road
Where will CAD creators concentrate their future developmental efforts and what can the rest of us expect?
CAD has moved from the desktop to the network, with engineers at different sites - sometimes in different countries and sometimes even working for separate companies - applying their skills to the problems of design and product engineering. Pencils and drawings have given way to the computer, graphics screens and plotters. Even with the fundamental limits of geometry and algorithms, CAD continues increasing in importance, especially as digital designs age and are transformed into generations of new products. But the million-dollar question out there is where will CAD be in five years? What will it be capable of doing for users? How will it affect industry, and perhaps the most important question of all - will the same people still be using it?
"We expect there to be a growing convergence between pure industrial design tools and CAD/CAM in the next five years because companies with vision recognize that integrating these two disciplines will speed time-to-market and reduce development costs," says Robert Fischer, vice president of sales and marketing for VX Software, Inc. (Palm Bay, FL) - a software development company. "Smart developers are concentrating on what users will need - more speed, robustness, easier-to-use parametric design, easier-to-learn advanced modeling and seamless data exchange between systems."
CAD Trends
There are several movements underway in CAD that in the next five years promise to help change the function's landscape greatly:
A movement toward the Internet for sharing data live and for quickly modifying complete solid models.
CAD systems must be designed from the ground up to use the Internet and to quickly capture changes made by globally dispersed development teams. This trend is already demanding that the very architectures of CAD programs be overhauled. Most CAD geometry engines, even though used by the current generation collaboration tools, still rely on rigid, history-based modeling methods. These approaches are far too cumbersome to encourage serious collaboration, in which teams alter production-ready models and finalize designs online. CAD programs intended for the Internet must become easier to use for non-specialists and more interoperable within native environments and with outside systems.
A movement to work more freely with large assemblies in a true what-if environment, making radical design changes on the systems level without breaking the rules governing construction of current history-based models.
On the systems level, individual parts form assemblies, or families of interdependent and perhaps moving parts. Functional modeling will allow large-scale changes to assemblies without significant remodeling. This will happen because modeling will be based on shapes and rules rather than solely on detailed geometric variables and rigid design steps. Essentially, designers will be able to think and design in whole assemblies rather than work through a series of individual parts that need to be meticulously mated and tested as a system to ensure their basic integrity. Currently, designers are penalized for making major changes to large assemblies. Future CAD systems built to support unambiguous creations of features will provide a rich environment for exploring new design possibilities, leading to innovative "leapfrog" designs instead of autious "evolutionary" products.
A movement toward rules-based modeling to ensure speed, accuracy and design standardization necessary to provide true interoperability in model-to-model collaboration efforts.
Rules-based modeling improves the efficiency and quality of designs by shifting the emphasis of product modeling away from time-consuming construction of geometry. At the heart of functional modeling are features that encapsulate rules governing how design elements - such as ribs and pockets - should behave to meet industry-specific design and manufacturing expectations. The development of rules-based modeling will continue for the next five years to capture knowledge about materials, manufacturability, part design strategies and more. Such approaches will provide greater interoperability by standardizing how features are created so that they can be distinguished from designer to designer. Rules-based modeling will ensure that designs are manufacturable and produced with the same speed that organizations now achieve with in-house design methods - just look at electronic component design to see what the effort in standardization has produced in terms of productivity, quality and time-to-market."Within the next five years, CAD will be object-based and have in it powerful and re-usable components," says Gian Paolo Bassi, chief technology officer of ImpactXoft (San Jose, CA) - a software development corporation. "For the user, the trend will be toward the primary engineering functions as part of their daily activities. The now distinct line between the designer and the engineer will soon be disappearing."
CAD As an Interactive Advisor
CAD is entering a very interesting period where vendors are looking at two functions that they believe will change the landscape in five years - (1) improving the knowledge level in the design phase and (2) trying to achieve better integration.First, designers and engineers are elevating their level of knowledge through semantics - the practice of actually injecting "behavior" into the model. When designers work on a part, they usually don't think in terms of low-level entities, they look at it in a top-to-bottom approach - seeing connections, parts of machines and shapes. But after creating the part, there are still the factors of stress, strength, manufacturing processes and cost. In a simple world, the designer thinks big. Companies are helping designers over-come these limitations with integration tools that they can use later. It is very important to capture the semantics of a design. The semantic approach is conceptual. Ten percent of design time is lost in the design process itself.
"There are very few engineers working out there without some sort of CAD system sitting on their desks," says Rob Vanderhaar, vice president of marketing and a design engineer at Intersect Software, Inc. (Sterling, VA) - an enterprise engineering company. "What is happening out there and something that I think you will see more of in five years is that all of the information from your CAD tool will be 'leveraged,' making it more valuable through a company's extended enterprise. Another trend is companies collaborating with other companies to create processes through partners, suppliers and offshore developers. What CAD vendors are doing [to enhance this collaboration] is taking desktop tools and integrating them with other technologies."
One Function Under CAD
While no one expects a "big bang," there is talk about "morphing" different CAD functions into one streamlined process. This would help not only compress the time designers and engineers spend building and manipulating products, but also tell them what they need to do without having to start from scratch. Building this morphing intelligence into the CAD system is already underway and is expected to be fully operational within the next half decade. With morphing, users will have the ability to make changes from a base design skeleton or template, containing all of the required knowledge and relationships needed to go from concept to production. But rather than just tweaking an existing design, it will have the ability to make fundamental changes in geometry and structure and even process, depending upon the upfront specifications.Morphing will have the ability to capture the underlying relationships between design and manufacturing, including both the manufacturing resources and the processes by which products are manufactured. With morphing, the CAD user will understand all there is to know about the product and what is required to make the individual parts. They will know to buy the materials needed to assemble and maintain the products, even down to what went wrong the last time the company made this part. This information will be available through real-time interrogation of the 3-D products definition, because the product and part knowledge will be linked to the many other applications used in procurement production maintenance. This will provide much wider uses of the 3-D. Rather than procurement looking up a part number, they will select the part they want to order from the 3-D assembly and get all of the information that they need.
"In the next five years we will see morphing happening," says Peter Marley, global CAD marketing manager for IBM, Inc. (Armonk, NY) - a global software developer. "It will change the way CAD is used - it will give the designers and engineers templates and knowledge capture. The usage will be by the creative people who will decide what they want to change it into. We'll have combinations of designers and engineers in a knowledge capture mode building templates, definitions and programming tasks. There will be a lot more overhead engineering, which will allow the creative element to be more creative and the possibilities for innovation more numerous because you won't have to worry about part interfacing. But for CAD to achieve this vision, companies have to look toward sharing information with each other."
For more information contact Gian Paolo Bassi of ImpactXoft (San Jose, CA) at (408) 360-7700; Peter Marley of IBM, Inc. (Armonk, NY) at (212) 745-4732; Rob Vanderhaar of Intersect Software, Inc. (Sterling, VA) at (703) 433-1630 or Robert Fischer of VX Software, Inc. (Palm Bay, FL) at (321) 676-3222.
