ICAM Releases Control Emulator for MCD-Based Machine Tool Simulation
ICAM Technologies Corporation (ICAM) is pleased to announce the release of Control EmulatorTM (CE), a new software product allowing NC programmers to simulate and test NC programs using Machine Code Data (MCD) within the CATIA V5 / DELMIA environment.
As compared to traditional APT-based verification systems, which simulate the programmer’s planned tool path, CE provides a more meaningful simulation that represents how the machine tool will react to the MCD output generated by the post-processor.
Furthermore, deploying CATIA V5 / DELMIA / CE as an integrated package enables the user to run simulations on a per operation basis during the NC programming session, resulting in a significant reduction in NC programming time.
CE accommodates an "in-process" or "on-demand" CATIA V5 / DELMIA simulation environment vs. the existing multiple process loop currently offered by independent competitive solutions. Benefits include improvements to NC programmer productivity and manufacturing process efficiency, resulting in faster time to market.
CE reads MCD to emulate the actions of CNC machines and controllers and provides users with the following advanced functions:
· Validates the accuracy of the MCD
· Verifies the actual tool path as described by the MCD
· Tests the MCD for machine / tool / part collisions
· Allows users to compare the design part against an MCD-based material removal part simulation
CE provides a powerful validation method allowing users to determine the association between MCD and specific operations within the NC program and allows for specific modifications to the tool path (CATProcess) depending on simulation results.
CE is fully integrated with CAM-POST®, ICAM’s NC post-processor development software; therefore, users may easily employ advanced features inherent to CAM-POST such as Macro Tracing, Call Stack Status, Input and Output Stepping and NC Variable Watching and Modification to optimize the machining process.
Other advanced features supported by CE include linear / circular / helical interpolation, drilling cycles, tool change and tool pre-select, length / diameter / fixture compensation, spindle / coolant and feed, subprograms, tool plane, program units, absolute vs. relative positioning and program dwell.
“MCD-based machine tool simulation provides NC programmers with the most accurate representation of the machining process,” said Brian Francis, ICAM’s Director of Research and Development. “ CE integrated with CATIA V5 / DELMIA provides a powerful simulation tool that allows NC programmers to avoid and correct possible programming errors that may have resulted in costly machine tool collisions and defective parts.”
About ICAM Technologies Corporation
For over 35 years ICAM Technologies Corporation has been specializing in the development and implementation of advanced NC post-processing solutions for manufacturers in major industries around the world. In 2002, ICAM has added an integrated machine tool simulator, Virtual Machine®, to its product mix that further strengthened its position in the NC manufacturing market. ICAM customers benefit from dramatic improvements to CNC machine optimization, NC programmer productivity and manufacturing process efficiency. ICAM's unique technology and services provide its customers and industry partners with the competitive edge that their business operations and customers demand.
Contact Information
ICAM Technologies Corporation
Phil Masella
Marketing Communications Manager
Tel: (514)697-8033
phil@icam.com
Programs Don’t Run On Design Alone
Michael Adami-Sampson, Vice President Product Strategy for MatrixOne
For many Programs in Aerospace and Defense (A&D), the opportunity for making profit for the enterprise is – not surprisingly – tied to Program performance. In most contracts for the US government, the amount of profit (generally accrued through award fees) is tightly coupled to explicit performance goals – just like the MBO a manager may have to calculate a year-end bonus. Achieving the established goals requires the coordination and collaboration of ever-larger and ever-more-dispersed teams. No amount of table-pounding by the program manager gets the job done in such a setting, one in which the people are distributed far and wide in different companies, countries and cultures.
The program office has a couple of major task to accomplish. One is to communicate the current plan to the team as both the team and the plan change and the other is to meet the goals established by the customer. Let’s look at some of these customer goals first.
On the inside, for many program members, it seems that the main thing is the design of the product and the manufacturing process – hence the historical emphasis on CAD and CAM tools. But the customer is aware of all the activities for which the contract is paying and needs a way to judge progress on all aspects of the job. Enter the Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL) whose data deliveries are meant to provide evidence of program progress and a way for the customer to maintain a degree of oversight. These data include design information (drawings and CAD models etc.) and span a whole range of other topics from schedule updates to analysis and test results. The quantities of such deliverables can be quite large over the life of a program and their due-dates are often tied to the shifting dates of specific program milestones. Thus, ensuring on-time, quality deliveries – which are the basis of program performance goal attainment and profit-making award fees – is a critical task.
Given the historical focus on the product, management of data deliverables has often taken a back seat when the time has come to provide tools to help the people assigned to this task. But the financial incentive for making this activity more reliable and less costly is becoming clear. As is the connection to the - historically technical - world of PLM.
A solution is now available from ENOVIA to address precisely this challenge of delivering CDRLs on-time, on-quality to the customer. It integrates in the PLM system the point-of-view of the data managers – those who know the delivery requirements of schedule, format and destination – with that of the data providers – those who know the data content. In so-doing the solution provides a way to manage the act of delivery in the same system in which the data providers save and manage their data work-products. For those (designers and manufacturing engineers) whose work-products have been traditionally managed in PLM, the approach is obvious, straightforward and without any additional burden. For those with less disciplined data management tools, the solution provides an easy and low-impact way of introducing them to a more robust technique.
Communicating “the plan” is a more subtle challenge. The big ideas to get across to everyone and all the time are schedule, requirements and the product plan.
Most participants’ understanding of schedule is limited to their supervisor’s “hurry up” admonitions and charge numbers and time recording. Of course, the schedule and milestones are captured in the earned-value tool, but this is typically exposed to a small fraction of the team and is too specialized to convey the big picture. In ENOVIA, the milestone plan is visible to all and is the basis for assisting the data managers and data creators accomplish their CDRL delivery task as discussed above. And the concept can be extended to convey all the tasks that the Integrated Product Teams need to perform while providing a place to put their deliverables in the context of the program schedule. Having associated task and deliverable, task status becomes automatic and no longer a debating point. This step alone can allow project managers to convert their jobs from that of high-paid “runner” (spending most of the day researching the elusive program status) to the thinking, planning, managing role they thought it would be in the first place.
It is so easy to lose information in the conversion from customer need, to derived requirement, to product architecture, to part design. This is the root cause of many program slips and performance failures. A partial solution is to provide everyone with ready access to the original requirements and all the derivations that occurred to convert them into a product solution. Allowing any program member to read the original requirements as the need arises is a good thing – providing access to the “voice of the customer”. But this is not sufficient, since few will have the time or inclination to read through a requirement document for relevant material. Better, is to decompose the document into individual requirements that can then be linked to their derived form, the solution architecture and ultimately the solution design. This allows any design engineer (newly-assigned or otherwise) to explore the requirements that pertain to the design task at hand. Such is the capability provided in ENOVIA in which all the points-of-view including and between the original customer need statement and the final design solution can be linked for team communication and subsequent requirements validation and verification.
And lastly, communicating the product intent. This requires elements of product content and time. Or, more precisely for the design community, the idea of “releases” or
“product versions” that are planned and scheduled. The familiar term for this in A&D is “baseline”. The formal Functional, Allocated and Product baselines appear in all programs. Not so common is to use the same concept to manage changes to the product through the passage of time. Certainly, the major changes show up as new Model designations or as Marks as is common in Europe and elsewhere, but the intermediate changes often all get lumped together, distinguished only by date or end-item effectivity at the component level. As many other industries (including Software) have discovered, continuous, uninterrupted change traffic leads to high-cost products and high-cost support. A better way is to consolidate changes into product releases (aka “baseline”, “standard” …) that can be scheduled for introduction. This approach reduces unnecessary variation in the factory, for the customer and for product support. This product planning technique is supported in ENOVIA to enable traditional baselining as well as product releases.
Within each product release, the architecture of the product can change. An aircraft can add new choices of equipment, or replace aluminum structures with composites. A weapons system can add new communications channels or encryption capabilities. These are all features of the product, and during product planning are “to be” product features. In ENOVIA, they constitute the backbone of the product architecture – the conceptual definition of the product that conveys to the entire team what the product will eventually consist of. To the extent that features require new design – versus selection of existing designs – they also are an indicator of what the design community has to invent. And all of them tell the manufacturing team what they have to figure out how to build. Thus the product architecture is the most powerful way of communicating overall design intent to the entire team. And coupled with scheduled product baselines, tells the team when changes are intended to occur. In other words – the product plan.
Using these tools and techniques provided by ENOVIA, Program Managers can significantly improve their odds of meeting the customer’s requirements and earning much-needed profits for their company. But we don’t recommend giving up on pounding the table just yet.
Dassault Systèmes Announces Enhancements to DELMIA V5
New Version Improves Programming Productivity and Accuracy
Dassault Systèmes announced that Version 5 Release 17 of its PLM software includes numerous enhancements to the DELMIA V5 Robotics program, including a new capability that defines and simulates complex flexible manufacturing devices such as multi-wrist robotic arms. This allows for more accurate simulation of the manufacturing processes and better defines resource allocation.
Additionally, new native language teach pendant capabilities allow off-line programmers to program robots with V5 3D processing planning tools using both a teach pendant and programming language familiar to the robot technician. Productivity is therefore improved as the user no longer needs to learn a new programming language.
Users of V5R17 DELMIA robotic simulation solutions also now have the ability to customize their solutions through the use of user-friendly Visual Basic (VB). New interfaces include tag/tag group creation and manipulation, controller data profiles, kinematic relations, tool mount model and task.
With the new V5R17 release, DELMIA’s industry-leading robot motion planning is even more accurate and robust with new high cycle time and path planning validation and analysis. For applications requiring the highest level of accuracy, Realistic Robotic Simulation and Realistic Robotic Simulation II modules are available.
Providing a single programming solution for all major robot vendors, DELMIA’s V5 Robotics, allows for the design, simulation, optimization and off-line programming of robotic workcells in a 3D digital factory environment. It can capture the underlying philosophy of and intent of the robot programmer. This enables the company to capture and reuse best practices, leverage programming knowledge, and automate the repetitive work of robot programming.
DELMIA’s entire solutions portfolio is founded on a unique Product, Process and Resource data model supported by a common Manufacturing Hub, which allows manufacturers to store, manage and reuse all product, process and resource information throughout the product lifecycle. It shares the same architecture as sister companies CATIA® and ENOVIA®, seamlessly integrating information throughout the enterprise.
Leading independent Software Developer, Kineo CAM, to Provide Technology for Automatic Motion and Path Planning on V5 Platform
The leading technology for automatic motion and path planning for Kineo Computer Aided Motion (Kineo CAM), an independent software developer, has been integrated with both DELMIA DPM Assembly Process Simulation and CATIA DMU Fitting Simulator.
The user community expects this partnership will further increase its productivity: “At Audi AG we use Kineo CAM’s Automatic Path Planning technology for serviceability and manufacturability studies in the virtual vehicle development,” commented Thorsten Pfeiffer, DMU Process and Systems Integration, Audi AG. “We are very excited to discover DS DMU Path Planner and DELMIA DPM Path Planner are integrating KineoWorks ™.”
“Kineo CAM’s mission is to provide its customer with world-class component technologies enabling them to improve their productivity and quality. This agreement with DS will allow every user of ENOVIA, CATIA DMU Fitting and DELMIA DPM Assembly to rapidly benefit from our technology,” said Laurent Maniscalco, CEO, Kineo CAM.
DELMIA Assembly Process Simulation enables users to simulate and validate assembly manufacturing and maintenance processes, allowing them to identify problem areas early in the product lifecycle, when it is most productive and cost-effective. The new partnership will see Kineo CAM providing its components within a V5 product workbench for collision-free path planning to facilitate design and manufacturability studies. It will offer highly efficient path planning in a constrained environment, resulting in time savings for the end-users and an excellent quality of the resultant path. The new products, DMU Path Planner and DPM Path Planner will be easy to use.
“We are delighted to partner with Kineo CAM,” said Frederic Vacher, manager, Business Partner Development, Dassault Systèmes. “Kineo CAM is recognized for its specialized tools, which serve the most advanced users of automatic path planning for industrial needs. It will really benefit various industries, like the automotive, aerospace and shipbuilding sectors, bringing Dassault Systèmes’ customers another truly innovative V5 PLM solution.”
With these new specialized products, Dassault Systèmes expects to bring significant advantages to DMU Fitting simulation and DPM Assembly Process simulation, due to DMU Path Planner and DPM Path Planner’s rapid path planning capabilities. Reusable computations and fast design validation will lead to time savings for customers, as well as the ability to solve very complex situations. End-user productivity, through faster computation and the automation of tasks, will optimize assembly processes with the speed of DMU Oath Planner and DPM Path Planner, and their ability to explore more scenarios and cost-saving alternatives. The products are currently available. Please contact your DELMIA representative.
ITER Develops Future of Electrical Power Generation with PLM Solutions from Dassault Systèmes
Fusion reactor developed using CATIA and ENOVIA
Dassault Systèmes announced that ITER, the joint international research and development project that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power, is using PLM Solutions from Dassault Systèmes as its development platform. ITER has used CATIA since the beginning of the project to define the “tokamak” - the heart of the ITER machine. As the project progresses, other areas, such as structure and piping design now need to be addressed, so ITER decided to extend its use of CATIA.
“DS’ PLM solutions are playing a key role in the ITER project. We are working hand in hand with DS to benefit from cutting edge design and collaboration best practices that have been developed in various industries. Accuracy and reliability are crucial to this project,” explains Eric Martin, head of design office. ITER chose ENOVIA as the collaboration environment for the ITER development community. ENOVIA VPLM will play a critical role in managing the large amount of ITER data as it is estimated that the ITER machine will be made up of around 10 million parts.
“By deploying CATIA and ENOVIA, ITER is able to manage the complete project within a single PLM platform, including Mechanical and Plant Design disciplines,” says Bruno Latchague, executive vice president development and support, Industry Solutions, Dassault Systèmes. “Our cooperation with ITER is about innovation. We are building a world-class program with them to ensure a successful global rollout of our PLM solutions for ITER partners and suppliers.” Over time, several hundred suppliers will be involved in the development, manufacturing and assembly of the ITER machine.
ITER brings together seven partners, known as the ITER Parties. These are the European Union (represented by EURATOM), Japan, the People´s Republic of China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA.