Currently (August 2001) Open CASCADE works towards the adoption of the OMG CAD Services V1.0 specification within the bounds of the OMG. The joint revised submission of CAD Services V1.0 was delivered in
June 2001 by the group of companies (NASA Glenn Research Center, IBM, SDRC, Unigraphics Solutions and Open CASCADE) with a considerable support of other companies, leading in the engineering domain.
Recently (July 2001) the Finalization Task Force (FTF) was chartered by the OMG MfgDTF in order to finalize the specification
CAD Services proposes an interface standard for Mechanical Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems that enable the interoperability of CAD, Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and Computer Aided Engineering
(CAE) tools. The aim is to provide users of design and engineering systems the ability to seamlessly integrate, world class, software across a wide variety of CAD/CAM and CAE applications through CORBA
interfaces. These standard interfaces enable a distributed product design environment that includes a variety of CAD systems.
This proposal focuses on establishing Mechanical CAD system interfaces that provide Geometry and Topology data to Analysis and Manufacturing applications and tools. The intent is to establish a series of
high-level engineering interfaces that do not require low-level data structures to answer mechanical engineering queries. To avoid many of the problems associated with data translation, this proposal provides CORBA
interfaces with consistent functionality across native CAD implementations. To the maximum extent, all queries use native CAD system geometry kernels and associated software as illustrated below.
Within the bounds of the 3D-Workbench project, Open CASCADE has decided to implement the specification in several steps. The first step involves a prototype implementation to verify the feasibility of the
specification, find possible problems and give a feedback to the CAD Services FTF before the final adoption. The next steps will provide the complete industrialized open source implementation, which will be published
on this site. Open CASCADE CAD Services will be implemented on top of Open CASCADE 3.1 open source object libraries. CAD Services implementation will establish the grounds for the architecture of a
3D-Workbench distributed engineering environment which will provide the open source development platform for 3D modeling and numerical analysis distributed solutions.
