It has been more than two decades that major CAD vendors have operated on their own terms and mentored theCAD service providers in a way that "if you don't look out for yourself, no one else will”. They might have done it to justify their proprietary formats and 3D modeling standards as the best of their individual set of tools andapplications. Very often the vendors would make it a point to play nice as compared to competition, however; their efforts never really sustained for a longer time frames to take care of customer’s frustrations when it came to incompatible CAD formats.
Challenge of dealing with multiple CAD formats is a long known pain for engineering organizations, resulting in investment of millions of dollars and thousands of man hours to pull up 3D CAD models from Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Navisworks and many more, to a platform where they could be easily shared for design collaboration. These investments may vary from organization to organization, but the fact remains that AEC firms delivering 2D Architecture, 3D BIM Modeling & Visualization, MEP design & drafting, 4D BIM for Construction Sequencing and5D BIM for Cost Estimation solutions, spend hefty amounts on 3D model exchange which includes data migration software and the labor expenses for executing the manual data re-entry.
Not that nothing has been done to address these challenges. A wide plethora of tools and data format standards such as STEP, IGES and JT open have been rolled out time and again to eliminate the pain areas. But all said and done, 3D CAD data exchange still remains a burning issue, may be due to diversity of CAD landscape. It seems till now, though CAD users and engineering organization have been trying to voice out their challenges for all these years, their complaints were not loud enough to compel CAD vendors to take a decisive action.
Time to change the Unchanged
The time has come, as the idea of infusing interoperability across a range of products between the two software leaders, Autodesk and Siemens PLM (Product Life cycle Management), has finally materialized. Finally they have entered into an agreement, which calls for both the companies to share toolkit technologies and do application exchanges in a regular fashion so as to build future products that are interoperable. The best part is that it’s not only about CAD, but all the high-end visualization applications and PLM software.
All said and done, the expected outcome of this interoperability agreement for the customers is likely to be huge. The software giants, Autodesk and Siemens, agreed to a mutual goal of making it more cost effective for users to exchange data. With increased possibilities that the results would be less error prone and problematic for the challenges their customers always faced while trying to import or export file formats.
However; the one thing that raises doubts about the entire change is that these standards are designed with a prime focus on lightweight format for collaboration, and considering this fact technically, it does not address the scope of interoperability needs to its fullest. The agreement has been entered into, over and above the interoperability efforts made in the past, to make integration a lot more convenient. The sole focus is on creating built-in integrations in a more integrated yet native manner.
But how do we know that the things will be different this time? No one is sure of it, however; evolving 3D model interoperability may change the scenario for these vendors and the engineering organizations as well.
Interoperability; the change
Today the situation is that companies though big, from concept to execution, supporting clients from aviation, automobile, heavy engineering, oil and gas, Building Design and Construction and civil engineering industries at any stage of product development life cycle, have any one standard CAD offering in place. The outbreak of mergers and acquisitions, and ever evolving global design chain, has ensured that most shops have several versions of CAD, simulation and PLM tools in house.
Products are becoming increasingly complex day in and out, resulting in need of a lot more software apart from CAD for design and dependence on integrated workflows across functional engineering domains. Now if we blend it with this emerging idea of open ecosystem of apps, some of them even driven by cloud, it seems that leaves no room for application silos apart from 3D file incompatibilities.
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