Managing CATIA V4 Obsolescence

Transcription

1 An ITI TranscenData White Paper 5303 DuPont Circle Milford, OH Phone: Website: Managing CATIA V4 Obsolescence Five Strategies for the Last-Minute Manager Author: Jamie Flerlage, Regional Director Technical Contributors: Doug Cheney, Program Manager Mark Gammon, Program Manager Tony Provencal, Program Manager 1 October All Rights Reserved.

2 Situation Summary The retirement of CATIA V4 on December 31, 2011, marks the end-of-life of a technology that revolutionized the product development processes of global manufacturers and ignited a paradigm shift in digital manufacturing. Today, these manufacturers face the challenge of preserving decades of intellectual property created in CATIA V4. The planning and execution windows have narrowed, hardware and software support for V4 is becoming increasingly difficult to find, and as managers dig through terabytes of data, they are finding unknown and undocumented complexities in their V4 datasets. CATIA V4 possesses unique geometry entities (i.e. mock-up solids, dittos and piping entities) that pose a number of problems to the conversion process. Moving and maintaining history, features and drawings poses yet another challenge, but closing the quality gap through verification and validation is also essential to building internal credibility, meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring downstream reuse. Converting V4 data to functional CAD system equivalents is nothing short of complex, error-prone and expensive, but the cost of losing intellectual property and maintaining legacy systems is higher. This brief introduces engineering and IT managers to process improvements, automation solutions and technical best practices for minimizing and eliminating the need for CATIA V4 licenses, hardware and support. Strategy 1: Open, View and Translate CATIA V4 Models An attractive alternative to migrating CAD data from V4 to V5 is to leave the data in its V4 form, make use of CATIA V5 s ability to open and display V4 models, and reference them within V5 assemblies. But even if Dassault were to extend its support of CATIA V4, many of the hardware and operating system technologies used to support V4 are either unsupported or retired. The first strategy begins with providing some basic functionality that allows the user community to open and view CATIA V4 files without the need for a V4 installation. Users will lose feature and history information, but the solution preserves geometric entities. It also supports a wide range of V4 element types and attributes, including SolidM, Pipe and Ditto assemblies. Once opened, users can identify and translate those entities vital to downstream reuse scenarios and save out the file to CATIA V5. By avoiding the translation of additional or unwanted data entities, organizations will increase the success rates of their automated solutions. The following screenshot illustrates a V4 model displayed within ITI s CADfix application: 2 October All Rights Reserved.

3 Strategy 2: Edit CATIA V4 Models in Place For some organizations a mixed V4/V5 model format strategy is a cost effective way to retain access to valuable legacy V4 IPR without the cost of remodeling, or the data reliability issues associated with migrating to native V5. In this scenario the ability to select and delete certain parts for redesign, while retaining the remainder of the V4 model,is a key capability, enabling the newly designed parts and original V4 data to be reassembled in a mixed V4/V5 assembly. The second strategy offers users the ability to open, edit and save V4 models containing a wide range of element types, including SolidM, Pipe and DITTO assemblies. SolidM support is offered in either converted BREP or original facetted forms; export of assemblies to V4 Dittos is also supported. An extended list of these capabilities is listed below: Import of SOLIDM entities in native V4 facetted form Display of SOLIDM entities within CADfix that mirrors the appearance in V4 Export of SOLIDM entities to native V4.model file with full preservation of internal facet structure, appearance and compact storage Import of DITTO assemblies including attributes (color, layer, label) on instances Export of an assembly to a V4 DITTO assembly, with instance attributes preserved Import of PIPE entities with conversion to exact BREP form (original pipe type held as attribute) Import of PIPE connect (CNP) entities as free points The screenshots on the following page illustrate ITI s capability for opening, editing and preserving these entities using our CADfix technology. 3 October All Rights Reserved.

4 Original V4 model open in V5 V4 model open in CADfix. Selected parts deleted, others re coloured Updated V4 model re opened in V5 Strategy 3: Parametric and Associative Translation The feature exchange process between CATIA V4 and CATIA V5 is not a straightforward process; some features in V4 do not have feature equivalents in V5, some are created with different geometry/topology, and some fail to generate due to geometry/topology requirements that are more restrictive in CATIA V5 than in CATIA V4. Many technology solutions neglect to fill these gaps, which causes significant quality issues during large migration projects. ITI TranscenData s Proficiency application uses a patented technology, Feature Fallback, to identify incompatible features and replace them with accurate geometry. When these types of models or assemblies are identified, managers can use this technology to automate a partial conversion, and then manually edit and repair models using the CATIA V4 2D/3D Completion Wizard (see example). 4 October All Rights Reserved.

5 This automation solution also includes robust support for V4 drawings and multi-model-link structures, thus enabling the user to leverage a single automated process that maintains structure and link mapping, feature history, and 2D drawing information. The following screenshot demonstrates how ITI s solution automatically handles an incompatible feature and reports the outcome. Original V4 Fillet Generates Error in V5. Feature is accurately re created as geometry. The above report documents an incompatible feature and its resolution. 5 October All Rights Reserved.

6 Resources tasked with reviewing and correcting problematic translations face challenging, time consuming tasks of manually re-mastering the part and repairing complex features. The Completion Wizard, an ITI utility, offers a semi-automated approach for working through a list of problematic features in V5, and then selecting the most optimal solution for replacing said features. Example showing Proficiency resolving a complex fillet with the Completion Wizard. Strategy 4: Upgrade Drawings to MBD (Model Based Definition) Models In addition to filling these feature conversion gaps, Proficiency offers yet another patented technology for transforming 2D CATIA drawing information into a 3D CATIA V5 model. This technology, trademarked as Draw-to-PMI, consumes V5 models with associative drawings and produces a V5 model with 3D PMI., thus automating a critical (and often manual) function; ensuring labor savings, functional data, and model accuracy. The translation and upgrade of drawing information allows companies to expedite MBD adoption, and simplify the number of linked documents imported or controlled by their PLM system. The illustration on the following page shows a CATIA V4 to CATIA V5 Draw-to-PMI example. 6 October All Rights Reserved.

7 Strategy 5: Managing CATIA Quality and Validation Each project has its own nuances, but there are essentially three factors for assuring the quality of your V4 data and managing the risks of your V4 obsolescence initiative: Assess the datasets prior to remastering or conversion. The functionality offered in ITI TranscenData s technology, CADIQ, allows users to identify and segregate large groups of models that may not be candidates for automated conversion. This grouping can be done via statistical analysis (models which contain certain types of entities) or analytics (models with specific geometric conditions). When these types of models or assemblies are identified, managers can minimize the risk of unanticipated migration failures and increase forecasting accuracies for resource requirements and project timelines. Validate and certify the accuracy of the end result. Once the CATIA V4 data has been moved to CATIA V5, it is imperative that the end result in the target system be verified against source. Through CADIQ, ITI TranscenData supplies the only vendor APIbased validation solution for CAD. If there are discrepancies in the resulting output, the user can document those results by exporting a PDF report out of CADIQ. The first figure is an example of geometric/features translation validation. 7 October All Rights Reserved.

8 For semantic validation, ensure that the intent (or meaning) of the data has been properly translated, allowing for expected, insignificant variation. The figure below is an example of PMI translation validation. Compare translation/remastering paths before selecting a provider. CADIQ also allows users to compare the output produced by any conversion tool or manual remastering provider. This functionality provides engineering managers with the power to evaluate vendor and thirdparty solutions side-by-side and determine the best tool or path for a given V4 dataset. The figure below is an example of a translator comparison used for a vendor translator trade study. 8 October All Rights Reserved.

9 For More Information TranscenData is the US-based, engineering systems interoperability division of International TechneGroup Incorporated. The company offers consulting services and software solutions for automating the interoperability between CAD, CAM, CAE, PLM and ERP systems. Since 1983, TranscenData has become a trusted partner to Fortune 500 manufacturers trying to solve the problem of V4-to-V5. To schedule a complimentary consulting session with one of our Program Managers, please call and ask to speak to Shawna Rockwood, or the author, Jamie Flerlage, at jjf@transcendata.com. Readers are also invited to attend an online technical workshop, titled, Managing CATIA V4 Obsolescence. To receive your WebEx password for this workshop, register at Reader can find more information about this topic by visiting our website at or reviewing our blog entries at blog.transcendata.com. 9 October All Rights Reserved.