AP-238 DIS is available for review

[st-announce at steptools.com]

All,

The Draft International Standard of AP-238 is now available at on the 
TC184-SC4 documents web site as wg3n1534, and will soon be circulated 
by the various national standards organizations. We have also posted 
it below for those who do not have access to the SC4 site:

ftp://ftp.steptools.com/private/ap238/ap238_dis_package.zip

At a moment like this, it is important to look back and recognize all 
those involved for the hard work they put into this document. I would 
especially like to thank:

Len Slovensky of SCRA for his help harmonizing the features of AP-224 
and ISO 14649. Alan Crawford of LSC for being the project editor and 
also helping us to harmonize the features. Gerry Radack of CTC for 
helping us review the document for conformance to the Application 
Protocol guidelines and many helpful suggestions on making the 
document easier to understand. David Odendahl and Mauro Costa of 
Boeing for helping us understand how to model CNC independent tool 
paths. Sid Venkatesh for his continuing assistance in organizing the 
OMAC forum for testing AP-238. Tom Kramer, Fred Proctor and John 
Michaloski of NIST for helping us to improve the quality of the 
EXPRESS models. Bill Freeman of SCRA for his leadership within STEP on 
the deployment of AP-224 and the development of the STEP Manufacturing 
Suite of AP's.

In addition we owe a big a thanks to the ISO TC184 SC1 team for 
defining the information requirements of AP-238. They include:
Fredrich Glantschnig who lead the SC1/Wg7 project until recently. 
The team at WZL TU Aachen who did most of the pioneering work and 
especially Henning Schulze-Lauen, Jochen Wolf, Yong Tak Hyun who 
helped us understand their work. Peter Muller of Siemens and the 
convenor of SC1 for his support and assistance in bridging between 
SC1 and SC4. Meinolf Groepper for his help in understanding the needs of 
European users. Professor Suk-Hwan Suh and the team at POSTECH in 
Korea for their work on the turning model and for using the lessons 
learned on developing the milling model to make the turning model 
even easier to harmonize.

Also we need to thank the members of the Super Model project 
Industrial Review Board for helping us understand the requirements of 
US industry. In particular, King Yee of Boeing, Carol Tierney of 
General Dynamics Land Systems, Tony Haynes of NCMS, Bob Waite of 
Chrysler, Darrol Houser and Steven Kamine of NASA JPL, Carla Mapes and 
Johnny Barnes of IBM, Chen Han Lee of UGS, Gary Hargreaves of CNC 
software and most of all John Callen of GibbsCAM for helping us to 
understand the requirements of CAM and CNC processing. We also need to 
thank Charlie Calderone and the staff at Benet Laborotories and Gary 
LaDue and the staff at Watervliet Arsenal for providing us with the 
facilities necessary to test the first prototypes of the standards.

We need to give special thanks to the team at Honeywell FM&T Kansas 
who worked with us to develop the first AP-238 translator. In 
particular Steve Brooks the system architect, Noel Christensen the 
developer of the translator and Bill Simons the leader and tireless 
advocate of this important technology.

We need to thank Xun Xu of the University of Aukland for his helpful 
comments on the usability of AP-238. Ed Barkmeyer of NIST for helping 
understand how to use XML. Ian Stroud of EPFL helped us understand how 
to model the AIM better. Keith Hunten of Lockheed Martin helped us 
resolve the mapping issues by encouraging us to develop more specific 
subtypes for the process mappings. Tom Melson of Boeing helped us 
understand advanced modeling techniques for surfaces. Howard Mason the 
convenor of SC4 helped us with many procedural issues particularly 
those pertaining to the relationship between SC4 and SC1. And the SC4 
secretariat for always responding quickly to our requests.

We need to thank the Manufacturing Task force team for helping us map 
out the information requirements of manufacturing applications. In 
particular Professor Kisinami of Hokudai University who lead this 
effort and Chiaki Sakamoto who has developed many test cases that have 
helped us all understand the data requirements of manufacturing 
applications immeasurably and has given us a substantial library of 
test cases and test parts.

We need to thank the GD&T harmonization team and in particular Tom 
Hendrix of Boeing who did the pioneering work to harmonize the 
models of AP-224 and AP-214. We also need to thank Jonas Nordstrom 
of Sandvik who helped us understand the requirements of the cutting 
tool vendors and the team at KTH Sweden who worked with him on 
these models. Ted Vorberger helped us understand the requirements of 
CMM applications. Simon Frechette of NIST initiated the project that 
achieved this harmonization and now allows all the AP's to use the 
same model for GD&T just like they all use the same model for geometry.

Last but not least we must thank the employees of STEP Tools for their 
tireless efforts. Especially David Loffredo who did all the editing 
work and most of harmonization work on the AP and probably contributed 
as much as everyone else combined. Joe Fritz who developed the software 
to generate the XML examples and worked patiently through many iterations. 
Jeffrey Young who developed the mapping table parser used by the XML 
tools. And Alex Lipatov who developed the first viewers and editors 
for AP-238 data and the first interfaces for Mastercam and GibbsCAM.

Mike Kutcher of IBM and STEP Tools and Marv Kriethen of Bridgeport
deserve special thanks for getting STEP Tools involved in the project.
Jack Boudreaux of NIST was our project supervisor. Ben Kassel of
NSWWC Carderock also gave us considerable assistance as did the ISE
shipbuilding team lead by Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.

Finally I want to thank all of you for your patience and assistance 
while we developed this new interface between CAM and CNC. I look 
forward to working with you during the final phases of standardization 
and for many years on its deployment and exploitation.

Martin Hardwick 
Team Leader SC4 T24 STEP-Manufacturing 
President STEP Tools, Inc. 
Professor of Computer Science, RPI