- Email: [email protected]
Future developments in the CAD environment
Future developments in the CAD envi ron ment Tony Hoare This paper presents the views of ICL, a major UK computer manufacturer, on future developments in the CAD environment. A particular emphasis is placed on the role of mainframes, particularly when used in networks linked to workstotions. ICL believes that the next 5-10years will see a transformation in the design office, in e similar fashion to that which has occurred through the computerization of the accounting office. computer technology, computer-aideddesign, computer network
The computer is still a rather conspicuour newcomer to the design office - there on sufferance, as it were, and has yet to prove its worth. It has not yet become an integral part of the furnishings, still less the vital executive tool it has long been in the accounting world. Thus for all the valuable work CAD systems are doing in many companies, pieces of paper are still the driving force. In most cases, drawings and notes are still passed physically from designer to draftsman, and then in the manufacturing environment again from draftsmen to part program mer. This parallels what happened in the accounts offices in the fifties and sixties. The computer arrived and was duly used to process the payroll and the invoices and to maintain the ledgers, but it was a long time before the accountants and their staff realised just what a powerful tool they had acquired. Eventually however, it became clear that entering information into the computer and getting pieces of paper out was far from the whole story. The information in the system is extremely valuable in itself, and particularly so because it is in the system: this means that it can be manipulated in any desired way at electronic speeds, without the trouble and expense of time-consuming labour-intensive data entry. Accountants have now found quite a number of ways of making this information work hard for its living. Most notably, it allows management to have a much more accurate and up-to-date picture of the progress of the organization than was possible with manual methods. As a result, they can identify any trends, good or bad, in time to capitalize on opportunities and to minimize the damage caused by problems. Having transaction data on a computer also enables staff to provide a more informed service to their public and to respond more precisely to their needs. All of these byproducts of computer usage either make or save money for the user organization. ICL believes that a similar transformation will take place in the world of CAD over the next 5--10 years. As yet, ICL(UK) Ltd, Putney, London, UK
CAD International Directory 1986
0408 255 552
designers, engineers and architects are using computers as labour-saving devices: as time progresses, it will become apparent that they can do much more, and the pattern of computer usage in design offices will change substantially as a result. The standalone 2D drafting systems which predominate today will be replaced by newer systems, which will not only provide much more powerful facilities than today's systems, but will be integrated into complete networked systems. These networked systems will consist not only of scientific workstations dedicated to particular tasks, but also of traditional mainframe computers acting as database managers and providing access to the stored data to whoever in the company needs it. The need for integrated systems can be illustrated best in the manufacturing environment. The events that take place there, from the initial order to the shipment of the final product, are a cyclic process. At each stage of this cycle, some information is transferred from the previous stage, and subsequently passed to the next stage. Furthermore, the stages do not take place in isolation. A designer working to a deadline, for example, may wish to know whether there is enough of a particular crucial component in stock before deciding whether to use it in his design, With an integrated system, he can check this as the thought occurs to him. The ability to store data, retrieve all or part of it at will, massage it into a different form if required, and make ad hoc queries to it, is provided on a computer by a specialised software tool known as a database management system. Many companies use database systems for their accounting data; most larger manufacturing firms also use a database product for storing production control data. We believe that the same facilities will be provided in the design part of the cycle by specialist engineering database products, such as ICL's Cadens Computer-Aided Design and Engineering System. Cadens is a product tailored for the storage of information about how you make things: drawings, parts lists, machine requirements and the like. It is used both by production management to increase their control over the progress of products from the design office to the factory floor, and also by staff in all these areas to obtain information they need in their work. Its routine daily use is by production engineering departments to speed up the process of bringing a product from the design stage to the factory floor. Production engineers would typically start with a skeleton bill of materials coupled with the designer's thoughts about machining tools and production processes; this information would be entered by a designer using a 2D drafting system. Using such facilities, the production engineers might then assess the capability of the company's machines to make the proposed parts, and validate the design information for conformity with company and international standards.
0010-4485/85/100023-02 $03.00 © 1985 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
23
They could then allocate part numbers and specify materials types. Finally they generate the production bill of material and formally realease this to the production planning department in a controlled manner. Use of this type of system substantially cuts the paperwork and effort involved in moving from the design to the production stage. The benefits that such a system offers are in such great demand that the potential market is huge for such a system. Cadens is a mainframe product rather than an add-on for a scientific workstation. This is because it needs complex data processing and manipulation techniques and is designed for access and use by many different users, simultaneously if necessary. Mainframes are designed to meet these requirements, whereas scientific workstations are designed mainly for sophisticated computation and graphical output. ICL sees mainframes playing an increasing part in the CAD world, not as replacements for today's drafting systems and workstations, but as complements to them, increasing their power and functionality by providing a range of new capabilities. Another function which will almost certainly be handled by mainframes is process planning, and for much the same reasons. This type of system takes the design as described by the engineer and translates it into the path taken by the product through the factory. A large part of a process planning application is standards information - both company standards and trade standards. This information will again by handled by a number of different people: not just the process planners themselves, but designers, craftsmen and production engineers. The combination of multiple access and data rather than scientific processing suggests a mainframe solution is the ideal. Storing the engineering and process planning data on a mainframe is one thing. It still has to be made available to all the necessary staff in their own offices on their machines. This is where the networking requirement comes in. The designer sitting at a workstation will on occasion need to have access to this data. So will the draftsman and the part pogrammer. The simplest thing to do, therefore, is to link their systems together in a network. All these professionals, instead of working in isolation, put the results of their work into a common pool of information which is then available (subject to any required security precautions) to anyone else who needs it. Each professional's system will still work on a standalone basis, and will indeed still be largely used in this way. But when there is a need for data created elsewhere in the organization, the information is then available to them at their fingertips. Up till now, the advance of networking has been hindered by the lack of international standards. Each different computer manufacturer has developed different ways of transmitting data between one system and another, and as a result it is extremely difficult to connect up any two systems from different manufacturers (and indeed sometimes, different systems from the same manufacturer). Now however there is emerging a body of international data communications standards known under the collective name 'Open Systems Interconnection' (OSl). ICL believes that adherence to these standards by CAD manufacturers
24
is vital, and is committed to conformity with them as they become ratified by the standards-making bodies. This will allow companies that have already acquired CAD equipment from one supplier to buy different equipment from another supplier and still create a network from the two types of system. Once a network is created, value added benefits will start to become apparent. What they are, will naturally depend very much on the organization in question. As an example, many companies would be delighted to improve the quality of their technical documentation -- manuals, technical reports to management, sales proposals - but are unable to do so because of the costs involved. Many other value added uses of data entered to CAD systems which are not as yet foreseen will undoubtedly emerge in time. It is early days yet, and very few people have yet constructed sizeable engineering databases or even databases of drawings. The ability to link workstations into networks, and to connect them to mainframe-based systems such as engineering databases, will thus be a crucial requirement for success in the CAD market. For this reason, the players in that market are likely to change substantially over the next five years. There are at present some 120 companies actively marketing 2D drafting systems in the UK. We believe that most of these companies will disappear very shortly. They will be replaced by companies that have the database management and data communications expertise necessary to construct the integrated systems of the future. Technical developments will mean that the workstations too will change: indeed, this process is already happening. At present, most workstations use a 16-bit word length; increasingly, 32-bit systems will appear. This technical development will provide the CAD user with a more intelligent system which has significantly more power as well as more storage, adding up in total to altogether better cost/ performance. Two other major effects will be apparent to the designer. First, the screens will improve; the resolution will increase, allowing greater precision of working, and the use of colour will become more and more common. ICL's Perq 3000, for example, offers an optional colour screen which displays up to 256 colours from a palette of 16 million. Second, the increased power will allow the introduction of new applications. It is now possible to allow the designer to visualize design concepts before starting detailed work, and produce a complete and unambiguous description of a design with geometric precision. This type of product simply could not have been introduced using the workstation technology available a few years ago - the machines just did not have the power. These new powerful 32-bit systems will be increasingly used over the next few years. After that, ICL foresees another technical development which will extend the power of workstations still further - the use of special chips which will perform general purpose graphics functions. ICL believes that all of these developments together the introduction of mainframe-based database facilities, the creation of integrated networks, and the steady increase in power and performance of scientific workstations will transform the design office over the next 5 - 1 0 years.
CAD International Directory 1986
The computer is still a rather conspicuour newcomer to the design office - there on sufferance, as it were, and has yet to prove its worth. It has not yet become an integral part of the furnishings, still less the vital executive tool it has long been in the accounting world. Thus for all the valuable work CAD systems are doing in many companies, pieces of paper are still the driving force. In most cases, drawings and notes are still passed physically from designer to draftsman, and then in the manufacturing environment again from draftsmen to part program mer. This parallels what happened in the accounts offices in the fifties and sixties. The computer arrived and was duly used to process the payroll and the invoices and to maintain the ledgers, but it was a long time before the accountants and their staff realised just what a powerful tool they had acquired. Eventually however, it became clear that entering information into the computer and getting pieces of paper out was far from the whole story. The information in the system is extremely valuable in itself, and particularly so because it is in the system: this means that it can be manipulated in any desired way at electronic speeds, without the trouble and expense of time-consuming labour-intensive data entry. Accountants have now found quite a number of ways of making this information work hard for its living. Most notably, it allows management to have a much more accurate and up-to-date picture of the progress of the organization than was possible with manual methods. As a result, they can identify any trends, good or bad, in time to capitalize on opportunities and to minimize the damage caused by problems. Having transaction data on a computer also enables staff to provide a more informed service to their public and to respond more precisely to their needs. All of these byproducts of computer usage either make or save money for the user organization. ICL believes that a similar transformation will take place in the world of CAD over the next 5--10 years. As yet, ICL(UK) Ltd, Putney, London, UK
CAD International Directory 1986
0408 255 552
designers, engineers and architects are using computers as labour-saving devices: as time progresses, it will become apparent that they can do much more, and the pattern of computer usage in design offices will change substantially as a result. The standalone 2D drafting systems which predominate today will be replaced by newer systems, which will not only provide much more powerful facilities than today's systems, but will be integrated into complete networked systems. These networked systems will consist not only of scientific workstations dedicated to particular tasks, but also of traditional mainframe computers acting as database managers and providing access to the stored data to whoever in the company needs it. The need for integrated systems can be illustrated best in the manufacturing environment. The events that take place there, from the initial order to the shipment of the final product, are a cyclic process. At each stage of this cycle, some information is transferred from the previous stage, and subsequently passed to the next stage. Furthermore, the stages do not take place in isolation. A designer working to a deadline, for example, may wish to know whether there is enough of a particular crucial component in stock before deciding whether to use it in his design, With an integrated system, he can check this as the thought occurs to him. The ability to store data, retrieve all or part of it at will, massage it into a different form if required, and make ad hoc queries to it, is provided on a computer by a specialised software tool known as a database management system. Many companies use database systems for their accounting data; most larger manufacturing firms also use a database product for storing production control data. We believe that the same facilities will be provided in the design part of the cycle by specialist engineering database products, such as ICL's Cadens Computer-Aided Design and Engineering System. Cadens is a product tailored for the storage of information about how you make things: drawings, parts lists, machine requirements and the like. It is used both by production management to increase their control over the progress of products from the design office to the factory floor, and also by staff in all these areas to obtain information they need in their work. Its routine daily use is by production engineering departments to speed up the process of bringing a product from the design stage to the factory floor. Production engineers would typically start with a skeleton bill of materials coupled with the designer's thoughts about machining tools and production processes; this information would be entered by a designer using a 2D drafting system. Using such facilities, the production engineers might then assess the capability of the company's machines to make the proposed parts, and validate the design information for conformity with company and international standards.
0010-4485/85/100023-02 $03.00 © 1985 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
23
They could then allocate part numbers and specify materials types. Finally they generate the production bill of material and formally realease this to the production planning department in a controlled manner. Use of this type of system substantially cuts the paperwork and effort involved in moving from the design to the production stage. The benefits that such a system offers are in such great demand that the potential market is huge for such a system. Cadens is a mainframe product rather than an add-on for a scientific workstation. This is because it needs complex data processing and manipulation techniques and is designed for access and use by many different users, simultaneously if necessary. Mainframes are designed to meet these requirements, whereas scientific workstations are designed mainly for sophisticated computation and graphical output. ICL sees mainframes playing an increasing part in the CAD world, not as replacements for today's drafting systems and workstations, but as complements to them, increasing their power and functionality by providing a range of new capabilities. Another function which will almost certainly be handled by mainframes is process planning, and for much the same reasons. This type of system takes the design as described by the engineer and translates it into the path taken by the product through the factory. A large part of a process planning application is standards information - both company standards and trade standards. This information will again by handled by a number of different people: not just the process planners themselves, but designers, craftsmen and production engineers. The combination of multiple access and data rather than scientific processing suggests a mainframe solution is the ideal. Storing the engineering and process planning data on a mainframe is one thing. It still has to be made available to all the necessary staff in their own offices on their machines. This is where the networking requirement comes in. The designer sitting at a workstation will on occasion need to have access to this data. So will the draftsman and the part pogrammer. The simplest thing to do, therefore, is to link their systems together in a network. All these professionals, instead of working in isolation, put the results of their work into a common pool of information which is then available (subject to any required security precautions) to anyone else who needs it. Each professional's system will still work on a standalone basis, and will indeed still be largely used in this way. But when there is a need for data created elsewhere in the organization, the information is then available to them at their fingertips. Up till now, the advance of networking has been hindered by the lack of international standards. Each different computer manufacturer has developed different ways of transmitting data between one system and another, and as a result it is extremely difficult to connect up any two systems from different manufacturers (and indeed sometimes, different systems from the same manufacturer). Now however there is emerging a body of international data communications standards known under the collective name 'Open Systems Interconnection' (OSl). ICL believes that adherence to these standards by CAD manufacturers
24
is vital, and is committed to conformity with them as they become ratified by the standards-making bodies. This will allow companies that have already acquired CAD equipment from one supplier to buy different equipment from another supplier and still create a network from the two types of system. Once a network is created, value added benefits will start to become apparent. What they are, will naturally depend very much on the organization in question. As an example, many companies would be delighted to improve the quality of their technical documentation -- manuals, technical reports to management, sales proposals - but are unable to do so because of the costs involved. Many other value added uses of data entered to CAD systems which are not as yet foreseen will undoubtedly emerge in time. It is early days yet, and very few people have yet constructed sizeable engineering databases or even databases of drawings. The ability to link workstations into networks, and to connect them to mainframe-based systems such as engineering databases, will thus be a crucial requirement for success in the CAD market. For this reason, the players in that market are likely to change substantially over the next five years. There are at present some 120 companies actively marketing 2D drafting systems in the UK. We believe that most of these companies will disappear very shortly. They will be replaced by companies that have the database management and data communications expertise necessary to construct the integrated systems of the future. Technical developments will mean that the workstations too will change: indeed, this process is already happening. At present, most workstations use a 16-bit word length; increasingly, 32-bit systems will appear. This technical development will provide the CAD user with a more intelligent system which has significantly more power as well as more storage, adding up in total to altogether better cost/ performance. Two other major effects will be apparent to the designer. First, the screens will improve; the resolution will increase, allowing greater precision of working, and the use of colour will become more and more common. ICL's Perq 3000, for example, offers an optional colour screen which displays up to 256 colours from a palette of 16 million. Second, the increased power will allow the introduction of new applications. It is now possible to allow the designer to visualize design concepts before starting detailed work, and produce a complete and unambiguous description of a design with geometric precision. This type of product simply could not have been introduced using the workstation technology available a few years ago - the machines just did not have the power. These new powerful 32-bit systems will be increasingly used over the next few years. After that, ICL foresees another technical development which will extend the power of workstations still further - the use of special chips which will perform general purpose graphics functions. ICL believes that all of these developments together the introduction of mainframe-based database facilities, the creation of integrated networks, and the steady increase in power and performance of scientific workstations will transform the design office over the next 5 - 1 0 years.
CAD International Directory 1986