A Step Implementation For Product Structure Data Exchange

Abstract: Scania is a Swedish automotive manufacturer for heavy vehicles and engines. It also offers transport solutions and long term commitment for customers. In today's Scania, a modular system provides a huge variety of specifications to meet varying dramatic needs for different customers. In order to be able to meet the diverse requirements of customers, modular approach with the support of reusable components is used to increase the efficiency of designing different products. To customize both product development and product design, computer aided design(CAD) is used to support the process of design and design documentation. "CATIA" is a multi-platform CAD software and "ENOVIA" is a product modeling product offers product database management for virtual model design into CATIA, both "CATIA" and "ENOVIA" are developed by the French company Dassault Systemes are chosen by Scania to support its product development. The modular system approach requires the system support for product structure, which is managed by a mainframe called SPECTRA. The thesis project is mainly about system designing a new module which takes the responsibility for exchanging information between SPECTRA and ENOVIA. In more detail, the new component is to perform a mapping of data in SPECTRA format into a format which ENOVIA can import. The mapping module has several interfaces with other applications in the system. JavaMigrator provides the environment to import data from the mainframe and transfer the data into the module and finally output the expected data format into ENOVIA. To achieve this purpose, several possible solutions were proposed and several methods were tried. Since an in-house developed CAA-module is highly preferred by Scania, the new mapping component will finally be designed into two separate modules, the first part converts the XML extracted from SPECTRA into an intermediate format and the second part is designed to convert the intermediate file into the expected target file. The intermediate file is required, since the format is independent of changes in both SPECTRA and ENOVIA. Furthermore, it is flexible and less complex to maintain than direct mapping from exported XML to ENOVIA. The report focuses on five parts, background, project specification, methodology, implementation, result and future work.