Product data exchange - The international solution

Product Data Exchange is becoming more and more important in the development towards integrated product modelling. The internationalization of product development and espacially the opening of the European Market in 1992 demand an international solution for Product Data Exchange. Distributed environments, concurrent engineering, and group work computing are the major tools to support the integration of the components of an open CIM environment. All of these tolls need data exchange among the system components as well as between different system environments. STEP, the Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data, is on its way to becoming the international solution. This paper describes the development and current activities in Europe designed to meet future needs for product model data exchange