BACKGROUNDER

AUTO-TROL'S MONARCH OPERATING ENVIRONMENT

Despite the intuitive advantages of concurrent engineering -- real-time data sharing between different design teams on a project -- design engineers, manufacturers and support personnel today find themselves locked in a battle with proprietary technologies. These closed environments limit design data access to only one engineer at a time, and make the development and integration of new tools a costly, time-consuming effort.

Instead, imagine a software environment designed specifically to support application integration tasks and requirements. This environment would also promote the development of engineering applications that can interoperate concurrently through standard data, maintaining their own identity while providing services to the rest of the system.

Clearly, such capabilities would eliminate many of the bottlenecks and inefficiencies found in today's manufacturing environments. Potentially, these capability could fundamentally change the way manufacturers do business.

Monarch is the industry's most extensive implementation of the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP, ISO standard 10303), providing the first enterprise-wide environment for effecting concurrent engineering. It combines object-oriented technology with industry standards to provide plug-and-play capability for both data and modeling applications. Monarch eases the integration of exisiting engineering and business productivity applications. It also offers manufacturing companies an efficient path for migrating to STEP compliance. Lastly, Monarch's object-oriented technology provides an ideal platform for developing a new generation of ``component software'' applications capable of interoperating concurrently on STEP data.

The Manufacturing Software Integration Dilemma

In today's highly competitive global markets, manufacturers of everything from clock radios to jet aircraft are tying their future competitiveness to computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering. According to Daratech, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., research company, software sales in this market are expected to reach $8.1 billion in 1992, with double digit growth forecast for next year. But while computer-aided systems have brought many advantages to these industries, the full benefits of computer-integrated manufacturing won't be realized until engineers are able to quickly and easily apply specific tools to solving their problems while allowing management to access the information it needs to make sound business decisions.

In the past, large companies generally acquired one primary CAD system to perform their high-end design and production drafting tasks. Over the years, these systems acquired additional functionality to meet customers' demands, including many specialized tasks ranging from structural analysis to the control of machine tools. (As they have done so, they have become huge, unwieldy bundles of code that are difficult for developers to manage.)

Today, however, the market is evolving. Companies seeking a competitive advantage are encouraging engineers to seek out and integrate best-of-class tools to perform highly specialized tasks such as structural and motion analyses, rapid prototyping, machine tool operation and other related functions. Personal computers are being used in greater numbers throughout the enterprise to support everything from 2-D conceptual design tools to management information systems. Finally, management is demanding access to design data to help them make more informed business decisions.

Traditional engineering software, however, lacks adequate standardization to allow information to flow freely between these programs. Typically, each software tool stores its data in a proprietary format, requiring data to be translated before it can be used by another software tool from a different vendor. Although most applications can export and import data using an IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification) file conversion, a neutral data format, IGES is an ambiguous standard that does not always provide accurate translation of all the information in a design, requiring a lot of manual cleanup of the translated data. An arc, for example, may be defined in one vendor's database by a center point and the start and end points, while in another's it's defined as a center point and the start and end angles.

As a result, a manufacturing company may spend tens of thousands of dollars on a direct translator to convert data from one vendor's tool to another's. And each time a new tool is added, the complexity of integrating it with the others increases geometrically.

The situation in the engineering software market today is not unlike that in the computer hardware market ten years ago, where proprietary systems hindered the effective integration of computing resources throughout an enterprise. But while the computer industry has made great strides toward developing open, standards-based products that enable PCs, work stations, minicomputers and mainframes to work together more easily, the engineering software industry has not. In fact, the leading vendors have ignored the development of standards and have even refused to assist third parties in developing direct translators to allow their products' data to be read into other software. Having made enormous investments over the years to develop their engineering software, these vendors are reluctant to become a part of any initiative that would neutralize their advantage.

The Industry's First STEP Implementation

Through its implementation of STEP, Monarch enables everyone involved in the design, manufacture and support of a product to create, access and share the product information. STEP is vendor-neutral, and is capable of completely representing product data throughout a product's life cycle. The completeness of the STEP representation makes it suitable not only for neutral file exchange, but also as a basis for implementing and sharing product databases, enabling multiple users running multiple applications to access the same data simultaneously.

The STEP standard goes far beyond the capabilities of IGES, capturing all product model data, not just geometric data. A STEP model include such particulars as product information (part number, version, security classification), tolerance specifications, material specifications, surface finish information, feature definitions, shape (both geometry and topology) and more. Collectively, this information completely defines the physical and functional characteristics of a component.

The STEP standard is able to support a product over it lifetime. Analysis results, test results, manufacturing process plans, setup sheets, tooling and numerical control information, quality assurance inspection information and support information, in addition to design information, are all captured as a product passes through these stages of its life cycle.

Finally, STEP solve the problem of incomplete or inconsistent data exchange by rigorously defining both the information required to specify a component and the constraints that apply to this information. To do this, STEP uses a formal information modeling language called EXPRESS to define schema for data that is to be captured and exchanged. In addition, any constraints on the data are also captured in the EXPRESS-based information model. This unambiguous definition leaves no room for vendors to misinterpret the standard, and enables implementations to be rigorously tested to verify their compliance.

The Next STEP in Engineering Software Standards

Monarch embodies Auto-trol's vision of the future of systems integration, with a focus on the discrete manufacturing marketplace. It is a future in which engineers are able to quickly and easily apply best-of-class tools to solve their design problems while management can access the information they need to make sound business decisions.

Monarch facilitates this vision by combining object-oriented technology with industry standards. Its standards-based approach eases the integration of existing engineering and business productivity applications and data. Monarch offers a truly open development environment for a new generation of applications that can interoperate concurrently, accessing and referencing standardized information and functionality simultaneously.

Monarch goes well beyond merely providing a STEP-compliant platform for application integration. When designing Monarch, Auto-trol set its sights far ahead of current systems and experience to produce an environment with the capability of supporting a large number of small applications that can be applied simultaneously to a user problem.

State-of-the-art engineering systems are clearly headed in this direction, with the requirement for supporting concurrent engineering spreading beyond today's modeler/drafting applications, and industry high-water marks climbing toward a fully open development platform. While concurrent engineering pulls applications closer together by their interdependencies, the desire to deliver a truly open system that both encourages third parties to develop applications and promotes system integration requires applications to be more loosely coupled.

Monarch solves the dilemma implied by these opposing goals by enabling multiple applications to access and reference standard information simultaneously. Applications can thus be made to interoperate concurrently through the STEP data standard, while maintaining their own identity and providing services to the rest of the system.

What Monarch Provides

The Monarch operating environment is both a vehicle for implementing a STEP migration strategy for existing (legacy) applications and data and an open, standards-based platform for developing a new generation of object-oriented, STEP-compliant applications capable of interoperating concurrently on STEP data. Its object-oriented design enables the underlying system resources to utilize best-of-class technologies without affecting future compatibility.

The Monarch environment comprises:

By providing core system-level resources -- modeling and display functionality, user interface and session management systems, an object-oriented database, and CORBA-compliant and SDAI programming interfaces -- Monarch allows software developers to focus strictly on providing core application functionality. Monarch-compliant applications will easily plug-and-play with all other Monarch applications, and be able to share data with all engineering and business productivity applications integrated into the environment. Users can mix and match best-of-class applications and technology to create a highly functional, customized design/engineering environment.

Monarch's object request broker (ORB) architecture eliminates the need to link every application individually to every other application. Instead, each new application need only be brought into the Monarch framework, which acts as a software bus to link all applications together. Once an application is integrated into Monarch, the data remains ``evergreen'' due to its STEP structure. As a result, Monarch provides an efficient path for discrete manufacturing organizations to migrate their existing engineering applications to STEP compliance.

Auto-trol Technology Corporation

Based in Denver, Colorado, Auto-trol Technology Corporation is an international systems integrator on the forefront of graphics and information technology. For 30 years, Auto-trol has provided advanced automation solutions in the areas of technical information management, process plant design, mechanical design and manufacturing, office and industrial facilities, civil engineering, mapping and electronic publishing.

Auto-trol's products and services include:

Auto-trol's customers include Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, educational institutions and military and civilian government agencies worldwide. Auto-trol integrates extensive graphic and information management systems, and provides consulting services to the automotive, aerospace, oil and gas, food processing, rubber, public utilities, pharmaceuticals, transportation/airport and general manufacturing industries.

Auto-trol markets its products and services directly through sales offices located in or near major cities throughout the US and in Australia. The company also markets its products in Europe through wholly-owned subsidiaries with offices in France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and in Canada through a wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary.

Management and Developement Team

Auto-trol's management and developement team combines business and technical strengths developed through long experience in engineering software and systems integration industries. Their expertise, knowledge and involvement with standards organizations have enabled Auto-trol to lead the systems integration industry as it moves to the next major stage in its development.
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