[step-manufacturing] Progress report

[Hardwick]

We are not having a telcon meeting this week because of thanksgiving so 
here is a brief progress report to go with your turkey.

We are currently engaged in three projects:

1. Update to the underlying libraries to make them more efficient and 
prepare the way for new additions to the schema for machine tools and 
cutting tools.
2. Update to the simulation code to model cutting tool and setup changes 
and to allow the simulation speed to be controlled by the feed speed.
3. Update to the STEP-NC explorer to allow projects to be linked using 
STEP Resource Locators (STRL's).

The STEP-NC Explorer was recently updated so that multiple designs can 
be in memory (v8.6 on home page). You can navigate fowards and backwards 
between these designs while they are in memory. Internally we are now 
able to store an STRL in any named entity (ie. entities with an its_id 
attribute in the ARM). In the very near future entities with these names 
will be shown as hot links so that clicking on one will navigate to the 
referenced location of the reference project. Thus, for example, you 
will be able to put an empty workplan into your project, give it a name 
that is the STRL of a workplan in another project and then navigate 
directly to that workplan in a single click. When we have updated the 
system so that the path name for a file can be given as an http address 
this will enable sharing of process plans over the Internet. For the 
moment the linked files have to be on the same file system.

The simulation code update has been in progress for about a month. The 
new changes will allow the simulator to much more accurately model the 
behavior of the machine tool. Our eventual goal is to make it possible 
for a user to program a machine tool model that exactly mimics the 
behavior of the real machine. We see this as being something that is 
done progressively with the initial default simulation being good enough 
for initial testing and the final simulation including all the required 
movements to make the part successfully. In between extra movements and 
motions are added to the STEP-NC program as necessary to correctly model 
each tool change and each setup change.

The change to the underlying infrastructure is the most difficult and 
beneficial because it makes everything faster, more flexible and more 
accurate. Right now the project is deep in the underlying ROSE code of 
our systems. Soon they will move to enabling the schema changes required 
for modeling machine tools and cutting tools. Lastly the files systems 
will be changed to enable reading of data via http links.

Martin Hardwick
Team Leader STEP-Manufacturing
President STEP Tools, Inc.
Professor and Acting Head of Computer Science, RPI