A Concept for Extracting and Sharing Technical Data from Digital Product Models for Subsequent Processing

In order to develop new products, design engineers build digital product models leveraged by 3D-Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) systems. During design, they specify various aspects of the product: e.g., Which technical elements like wholes, pockets and materials the product consists of, or which tolerances have to be observed during production. This information is vital to stakeholders in subsequent processes like production planning and control as well as process engineering or quality management. Nowadays, the information is shared via the distribution of technical drawings, which implies various problems (e.g. Change of media, different CAD-systems in use by different organizational units, or unnecessary overhead to retrieve the required information from the model). In order to mitigate these problems, this paper proposes an approach to extract the information that is relevant to the stakeholders from various CAD-systems, and store this information in a vendor-neutral format, which other application systems or employees are able to process.