Enabling Technology Providers
To learn more about our co-sponsors, please make a selection below:
Technology Presenters
Ken
Anderson
Director of Product Management, Adobe Acrobat
Adobe
Systems Incorporated
Robert Brincheck
Director, Automotive Business Unit
Dassault
Systèmes SA
Hiromi
Mori
General Manager and Technical Director, CAD/CAM/DMU
Development
Digital
Process Ltd.
Shawn
Underwood
Director of Marketing, Visual Systems Group
SGI
Stu
Johnson
Product Marketing Manager, Teamcenter Visualization
UGS
Integrating MVP into the PLM vision
There are special challenges involved with integrating MVP into the PLM vision,
particularly the technical aspects of integrating it with PDM. PLM and
its overarchingly broad vision of managing and correlating product information
over the entire lifecycle of a product has heightened the need and increased
the benefits that digital mockup, 3D visualization and publishing can offer
manufacturing industry.
Digital Mockup, visualization and 3D publishing were at first implemented as islands of automation. In mockup, the ROI came from the elimination of the cost and the time of building plywood mockups or hand-built pre-production prototypes. In production engineering, visualization applications were justified on a similar basis — no need to work with hand-built prototypes or try to mentally visualize how a product might be assembled. As outsourcing increased, communication with remote plants was made quick and easy with digital 3D models light enough to be sent over the Web. Publishing tasks such as creating marketing brochures, service manuals, and parts catalogs also benefited from automatically generated exploded views, and automatically generated cross sections provided product views and understanding that previously could only be achieved by laborious manual methods.
At first, little attention was given to integrating MVP with PDM. Consequently there are today many MVP databases that are only loosely linked to corporate PDM systems, and this means that many important benefits of MVP are not being realized.
Perhaps the most important of these unrealized benefits are those that come from precisely synchronizing all MVP data with the latest CAD releases and product configurations. Synchronization — especially precise and timely synchronization — ensures that downstream activities such as service manual and parts catalog creation are as up-to-date as the product itself, and that brochures illustrate the most up-to-date models, not, as often happens, superseded versions.
But synchronizing MVP files with the most up-to-date release of their pre-cursor CAD files is not an easy matter. There are many strategies and architectures for doing so, and each has unique benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls.
Database Architectures
PDM systems contain, among other things, CAD part and assembly files as well as configuration management information. Many of today’s PDM systems have also been extended to deal with internal or external MVP files. However, as the number of MVP solutions grow and become more widely deployed, the requirements for storing MVP files and relating them to the appropriate CAD files, as well as maintaining conformity with multiple valid configurations, has added a mind numbing level of complexity.
Today’s PDM systems must be able to manage this complexity or have the ability to provide configuration information to a database of MVP files stored on satellite systems.
Data Synchronization and Security
MVP stores 3D information much more efficiently than CAD. Some of the better MVP technologies achieve compressions of more than 95% over CAD without loosing significant accuracy. However, storing one set of data in an MVP format and another in a CAD format creates knotty problems. For starters, CAD files are constantly being updated during product development, consequently their MVP equivalents must also be updated. With some 30,000 parts (excluding fasteners) to be tracked in a typical automobile, and several million to keep track of in a large aircraft, MVP synchronization is no easy matter. Further complicating the situation is the fact that transforming CAD files into MVP formats and configuring them into digital product models takes many hours or even days in the case of an aircraft. Consequently, a robust architecture to support MVP conversion, synchronization and distribution must take the conversion time factor into account.
Data Security
Making sure that MVP files permit the viewer to see all that the viewer needs to see and no more, is a very important features of MVP file distribution. The other is long-term security of the information, and keeping track of who has what.
MVP Suppliers
There are today more than 20 suppliers of MVP solutions and technologies. Some are targeted at CAD users and help them deal with large assemblies as well as complete products, while others help CAD engineers to design parts in the context of where they will be used. Still other MVP solutions are targeted at production people for designing assembly processes or to the people who design packaging. These solutions are generally referred to as digital mockup. Being able to easily send 3D information over the Web can be very beneficial when collaborating with suppliers, or when purchasing parts, and there are companies that specialize in this so called visualization domain. Marketing and advertising MVP solutions are genially called 3D Publishing applications. Some, used for brochure production or TV advertising have very demanding requirements for creating photo realistic images, while other publishing applications such as for part catalogs work best when they are driven by the enterprise PDM system.
Some suppliers provide a one-stop shop for digital mockup, visualization and publishing solutions. Others are specialized in one or more but not all of these segments or even sub-segments of MVP. It’s still early times. The technology is just now maturing, and as it does, more and more applications are being discovered to help streamline processes in almost all areas of manufacturing.
The Present and the Future of MVP
Today's MVP products offer a low cost method for advanced product visualization capabilities. In general, MVP solutions are inexpensive; accurate; easy to learn and use; designed to supplement an organization's collaborative processes; capable of providing product-level and part-level functionality; and applicable to multiple domains. MVP solutions dramatically reduce file sizes compared to CAD, enabling extremely large models to be displayed on laptops.
Indeed, MVPs on the market typically provide the following capabilities, with each vendor offering something a little bit different: interference detection; clearance checking; measurements; red line/mark-up; weight/balance studies; fly-throughs; exploded views; perspective line diagrams with hidden line removal; cross-section studies; and access to CAD data. One major issue for MVP technology is security — granting access on a "need-to-know" basis. Companies that have supplier networks need the ability to restrict access to certain pieces of data to guard its intellectual property.
Technologies
MVP technologies have different important characteristics:
- File size
- Time it takes to read in a file
- Time it takes to pan and zoom
- The accuracy of the model compared to the accuracy of the CAD file
- The amount of memory required to display a very large model
- Whether a single MVP file can be used for all accuracies, or whether it is necessary to create multiple files so as to obtain the accuracy needed by various applications
Functions and Features
Mock-Up requires analytical functions such as clash detection, and clearance analysis. Visualization requires that annotations made in the CAD file be carried over to the MVP file and that these annotations can be hidden, selectively when necessary, so that unauthorized people don’t have access to them. Visualization also requires security measures because visualization files are typically taken outside of the office and must be carried on portable computers to a job site or to suppliers. Publishing solutions must be able to create exploded views for service and support applications as well as for parts catalogs. Also, marketing applications must be able to create photo realistic images as well as in-context scene building.
Dealing with Multiple MVP Formats
There are many MVP formats. Some optimized for mockup, some for viewing, and still others for publishing. Generally, mockup and viewing data formats tend to be the same, but often publishing formats are different. Of course, there are still other formats for 2D drawing visualization over the Web that must be accommodated, because it will be a while before 2D drawings are no longer used.
Viewer Wars
Viewers are often given away free. Customers insist on that. But viewers have different capabilities. Some are up to the job. Others are not. There is no doubt that for the next few years we are going to have to deal with many different viewers and MVP data formats. Can a standard be imposed? Should a standard be imposed?
Alternate Strategies
Often the question is whether to standardize on your CAD supplier’s MVP solutions, or use multiple suppliers. Some prefer to use the best of breed for mockup, visualization, marketing, purchasing, customer support, technical documentation, while others prefer to reap the benefits of standardizing on a single technology and supplier. With different vendors promoting different MVP technologies, does it make sense to use more than one? Better technologies offer more compact data, better performance (all of which means being able to use less expensive computers), more realistic images, more functions and better accuracy. But is it worth the overhead imposed by having to deal with different formats and the infrastructure to keep all these formats synchronized?