Advanced Design and Manufacturing Based on Step

by Xu, Xun; Nee, Andrew Y. C.

• ISBN13: 9781848827387
• ISBN10: 1848827385
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-01
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

Today, more companies than ever before are involved in manufacturing various parts of their end products using different subcontractors, many of whom are often geographically diverse. The rise of such globalization leads to an acute need for information sharing and exchange across the boundary of an organization as well as the country.The industry has been seeking robust standards that allow them to remove the data exchange barriers and to better support an integrated and collaborative design and manufacturing environment. The STEP standard came into being in the mid-1990s to respond to the need discussed as above. The ultimate goal of STEP is to provide a complete computer-interpretable product data format, so that users can integrate business and technical data to support the whole product life cycle: design, analysis, manufacturing, sales and customer services. STEP has recently been extended to cater for manufacturing data modeling and execution in support of computer numerical control machine tools, known as STEP-NC.Industry has been slow in embarking on the standard at the beginning, perhaps due to the immaturity of some of the accompanying technologies and practical systems. Since the turn of the century, various industry sections have been forthcoming in implementing STEP standards, and there has been no shortage of innovative technologies developed by researchers and successful stories found in companies. Advanced Design and Manufacturing Based on STEP compiles the literature of research outcomes, applications and industrial practices concerning the use of STEP in both the design and manufacturing domain.