CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
21 May 2010
Events News
ProSTEP iViP Symposium 2010 with Full Speed Ahead
Things are improving. Certainly, if the 13th ProSTEP iViP Symposium – which was sponsored by Daimler and Siemens PLM Software and took place on April 28th and 29th, 2010 for the fourth time in Berlin and for the third time in the Ludwig Erhard Haus – is perceived as a signal. The event attracted 350 visitors – which was not the record high from 2008, but already up 18 percent compared to 2009. The participants and referees of the all in all 43 lectures came from 12 different countries. And with 19 vendors from IT and services the accompanying exhibition did also grow again, as stated in the welcoming speech by Ulrich Ahle, Siemens IT Solutions and Services and member of the ProSTEP iViP board.
One of the association’s most important strength lies in connecting research and industry and in the vendors of IT and services for product creation. This strength was demonstrated particularly well in this year’s event. The three fields proposed ground-breaking ideas and solution approaches. From keynotes, workshops and parallel lecture sessions, over to the newly introduced Scientific Track.
The keynotes at the beginning set the tone for the motto of the event, Smarter Solutions for New Products, and this from all three sides: Prof. Dr. Bharat Balasubramanian, Director Research and Pre-Development, Product Innovation and Process Technology at Daimler, described clearly, how much the industry is currently challenged, to integrate a lot of useful information technology into their products. Modern vehicles are complex systems consisting of mechanics, electronics and software. Systems Engineering has therefore long become a practical requirement.
Accordingly, the vendors of standard software for product creation are working on expanding and upgrading their systems. Siemens PLM Software is going even one step beyond engineering – what was emphasized by the keynote of Chuck Grindstaff, Executive Vice President Products and Chief Technology Officer. Their developers are not only working on the supporting of an interdisciplinary function modelling across the entire product creation. Siemens has also put an eye on the continuity when it comes to production, automation, implementing and controlling, a continuous management of product- and product life cycle.
Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, was the third keynote speaker and drew an impressive picture of the bridges that science is building between today’s state of technology and the enormous future demand, which is becoming apparent. Science demonstrates first, what commercial vendors are starting to market as Cloud Computing: the integration of huge computer networks worldwide, this time at 260 locations in 55 countries. 200 virtual organizations with more than 14.000 users are managing around 330.000 jobs per day. Jobs like the read-out of data from the CERN: at a single detector 40 terabyte per second.
Two major topics – apart from numerous lectures on the core topic PLM and process restructuring - were building the central theme of the entire program: on the one hand the controlling of mechatronics and interdisciplinary product development through new methods and tools; and on the other hand the useful standards supporting this process like JT, which is since fall 2009 on its way to becoming an ISO standard - not least due to the intensive activities of the ProSTEP iViP Association in cooperation with the working group PLM of the German Automobile Association (VDA).
Only a few days prior to the event a memorandum of understanding between Siemens PLM Software and the ProSTEP iViP association was announced, attaching particular importance to the input of the vendors joined in the association for the further development of the neutral data format JT. As was incidentally also practiced in the case of a possible standardization of another format developed by Siemens PLM for the exchange of meta data with regards to production and the following processes: PLM XML.
An impressive plea for the importance of another standard promoted by the association was held by James DeLaPorte, PLM Project Manager at Gulfstream Aerospace. What do aerospace manufacturers have to do in order to ensure, conforming to the law, that their product data will still be readable 50 years after its creation? He will save it in neutral STEP format. Each night a complete backup will be run, with each file receiving an encoded signature. It has to be identical with the one of the day before. If discrepancies appear during this monitoring, immediate action will be taken to restore consistency. DeLaPorte: „Why data is going to be safe that way even in 50 years from now? Because we are dealing with pure data only, independent of any program and its proprietary format. “
The Scientific Track of the second day presented many projects, in which research and teachings are trying to close the gap between the industry’s demand and the products offered by the standard software producers. Three examples: the only functional models able to represent data from any system, existing at this time are a result from a research project at the Fraunhofer IGD in Darmstadt, which was presented by André Stork. The Fraunhofer IPK in Berlin is working under the direction of Prof. Dr. Rainer Stark in the consortial project ISYPROM on a continuous process integration through visual exchange of system models for the PLM integration of systems engineering. As in this case, the modeling speech used by Prof. Dr. Kristina Shea at the Technical University in Munich is SysML. This way, a sort of design catalogue will be developed in Munich, aimed at providing engineers in the conception phase with predefined components and elements for the creation of functional models.
Rarely has technological progress been addressed as comprehensively as on the occasion of this year’s Symposium. And rarely were research projects and firsthand reports so specific and close to the burning issues of industrial practice. The interest in the event, which went up considerably compared to last year, and the intensive discussions during the accompanying exhibition underline what current studies show as well: that Germany as a location for industry is working itself out of the crisis with new ideas and products. The Symposium proved impressively that the support of the association is an important element in this process.
About the ProSTEP iViP Association
The ProSTEP iViP Association is an international branch-specific community comprising leading companies in the automotive and aerospace industries, system vendors and research institutes. The aim of the ProSTEP iViP Association is to find solutions for the challenges facing the manufacturing industry as a result of networked collaboration in a worldwide development network.
A concept based on a coherent, cross-organizational and cross-domain view of data, processes and systems provides a solid foundation for meeting these challenges. The Association’s five main areas of focus reflect this approach: process management, system integration, product data standardization, engineering collaboration and knowledge transfer.
The ProSTEP iViP Association is headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, and was founded in October 1993 by 38 industrial companies and a number of system vendors as part of the German STEP initiative. Members of the ProSTEP iViP Association currently include about 200 companies and organizations from 17 nations.
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