Industry Summary Articles

Anark Corporation, leading provider of Model Based Enterprise (MBE) and Visual Communication software solutions, announced today that it has been awarded the production 3D MBE contract from Hill AFB for their Automatic 3D Part Report Generation (A3DPRG) system, which will put into production a complete system to create and modify 3D Part Reports for engineering and provisioning data from 3D Model Based Engineering (MBE) Computer Aided Design (CAD) models and associated engineering data in the A-10 Teamcenter Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) database.
These part reports are essential to satisfying the mission requirements to support the A-10 Enhanced Wing Assembly (EWA) created under the A-10 Wing Replacement Program (WRP) and the A-10 throughout its lifecycle.
For the past six years the Department of Defense has been leading the way in developing best practices and procedures to enable the 3D Model Based Enterprise (3D MBE) through the transformation of their Native CAD plus Model Based Definition (MBD) data into open formats that are free to view and free to deploy like 3D PDF and 3D HTML.
The A-10 aircraft is a 30 year old aircraft designed specifically for close air support of ground forces. It was designed in the 1970s with that era's 2D drafting and manufacturing techniques. To extend the serviceable life of this aircraft, the A-10 Wing Replacement Program was established to modify existing aircraft with new wings.
In order to reduce program costs, increase quality and provide for improved manufacturing techniques, the A-10 System Program Office chose to use 3D Model Based Definition (MBD) on the A-10 WRP parts and assemblies, rather than create a multitude of 2D Drawings which are typically hard to interpret and quickly become out of sync with the 3D CAD, PLM, and provisioning data.
This is a radically different approach than that used for all previous USAF legacy aircraft but allows for "drawing-like" documents to be generated in Adobe 3D PDF format that provides the same type of data the drawing previously provided. These new 3D PDF Part Reports have all the information that manufacturers, suppliers and casual users need to perform their support functions. 3D PDF Part Reports are native Adobe PDF documents which be viewed on every Government computer without the cost or IT complexity associated with proprietary 3D viewing software.
Under the A-10 Wing Replacement Program, over 10,000 3D PDF part reports have been generated to define the 3D technical data packages for the Enhanced Wing Assembly of the A-10.
"We are very excited to be working with Anark and their automated 3D PDF generation technology to modernize, automate, and leverage the deployment of our 3D MBD data here at Hill AFB," said Lt. Mitchell Kim, a program manager for the A-10 WRP. "Our expectations are that Hill AFB will become the model for modern 3D PDF MBE deployment for the rest of the Air Force and perhaps the rest of the DoD," Lt. Kim continued.

To view the original press release, please click here.

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