On the Insertion of a Legacy Conversion System into a Collaborative Virtual Prototyping System

The paper has two main goals. Firstly, it emphasizes the importance of including a legacy CAD data conversion system into a collaborative virtual prototyping (CVP) environment. 2D legacy data is of great intellectual value to the designer as reference data for designing new parts. Therefore, a legacy conversion system will help the user model parts more efficiently than by starting from scratch. This paper will then discuss a feature extraction system (FES) as a potential solution. This FES has the ability to automatically convert 2D legacy data into a variety of part formats and representations in a feature-based form, where the feature-based model representation provides more essential semantic data to designers and analysis.

Secondly, this paper will describe how this feature extraction system can be inserted and interfaced into a CVP environment. There are several aspects to this task. Firstly, identifying a suitable architecture to use as the basic CVP infrastructure. Secondly, the FES is an existing application that may need to be modified to handle the distributed computing environment. This involves writing COM/ActiveX wrappers to the application and exposing the necessary objects and methods. Other issues include load balancing to handle large number of users at the same time and interfaces to the Internet on the front end and back ends.