[step-manufacturing] Minutes of October 17 STEP Manufacturing Conference Call

[Martin Hardwick]

Attendees
--------------
Martin Hardwick, STEP Tools, USA
Alain Brail, Airbus (retired), France
Sid Venkatesh, Boeing, USA
Bob Erickson, Pratt & Whitney, USA
Fred Proctor, NIST, USA,
Vincent Marchini, Ameritech, USA
Ian Stroud, EPFL, Switzerland
Bengt Olsson, Sandvik, Sweden

There will be a session on Manufacturing Processes at the NIST hosted 
Model Based Engineering Summit on Wednesday, December 12th. NIST has 
requested help inviting key CAM vendors to be on a panel from 1:30PM to 3PM.

KTH is working to estimate the benefits of CAM to CAM data exchange for 
the Swedish aerospace, automotive and heavy equipment manufacturing 
industries.

SC1 of ISO is developing a new edition of ISO 14649 and giving serious 
consideration to replacing the current feature descriptions with those 
defined by AP-224 and used by AP-238 and AP-242.

SC1 is also giving consideration to make more use of the ISO 13399 
cutting tool model in the second edition of ISO 14649.

Two recently funded EU projects are prototyping new solutions using 
STEP-NC.

The STEPMAN project is developing parsers to read legacy M&G code data 
(ISO 6983) and generate STEP-NC machining operations. They are also 
developing legacy code generators for the STEP-NC machining operations. 
When the parsers and generators are commercialized, SME's will be able 
to read old machine codes and generate new programs for new machines, 
and these new machines will be able to have new style STEP-NC controls, 
or old style ISO 6983 controls. If they want to change the new programs 
they will be able to read them into their preferred CAM system using the 
new data exchange translators that we will be implementing.

The FoFdatation project is developing a new Art to Part pipeline for 
manufacturing that will enable new levels of integration between CAx 
systems  and shop floor control systems such as MES systems and 
enterprise level ERP systems. One of the projects in FoFdatation is 
developing a CNC based direct interpolation system for STEP/STEP-NC 
splines. The new control will use the data to demonstrate new levels of 
machining accuracy and efficiency. The interpolator will analyze the 
first, second and third order changes in the splines to make the 
machining more smooth and prevent jerk.  Other sensor data will be 
matched against this information to stop errors before they damage the 
workpiece or the machine.

STEP Tools is working on a third edition for the STEP file format (Part 
21) that will allow the workplans, workpieces and other manufacturing 
resources in a STEP-NC program to be shared across multiple sites.

The next telecon will be held on Wednesday October 31st (Halloween) at 
the regular times. A recording of this meeting is at the following ftp 
site:

ftp://www.steptools.com/private/Interoperability_costs/stepmanuf_telecon_20121017.wmv 


Apologies for the poor quality of the recording. A hot tea spill 
incident occurred last month and the machine that hosts these calls has 
been severely deprecated. It should be replaced by the time of the next 
call.

Martin Hardwick
Team Leader ISO STEP-Manufacturing