CAD Interfaces to the ARROW Manufactured Product Server

Abstract

The UK national project ARROW (Advanced Reusable Reliable Objects Warehouse) (Newnham et al. 1997, 1998a and 1998b) provides an Internet based framework through which it is possible to identify any of a range of manufactured products meeting specific design criteria. This open framework (based upon the IAI’s IFCs) provides a mechanism for users to search for products from any participating manufacturer or supplier based both on specific attributes of a product or on any of the textual descriptions of the product. The service returns the closest matching products and allows the user to navigate to related information including manufacturer, suppliers, CAD details, VR displays, installation instructions, certificates, health and safety information, promotional information, costings, etc. ARROW also provides a toolkit to enable manufacturers and suppliers to more easily map and publish their information in the format utilised by the ARROW system.

As part of the ARROW project we have examined the ability to interface from a design tool through to ARROW to automatically retrieve information required by the tool. This paper describes the API developed to allow CAD and simulation tools to communicate directly with ARROW and identify appropriate manufactured information. The demonstration system enables CAD systems to identify the closest matching manufactured product to a designed product and replacing the designed product with the details supplied by the manufacturer for the manufactured product as well as pulling through product attributes utilised by the design application.

This paper provides a description of the ARROW framework and issues faced in providing information based upon standards as well as containing information not currently modelled in public standards. The paper looks at issues of enabling manufacturers and suppliers to move from their current world-view of product information to a more data-rich and user accessible information repository (even though this enables a uniform comparison across a range of manufacturer’s products). Finally the paper comments on the likely way forward for ARROW like systems in providing quality information to end users.