Recently, collaborative design has played a vital role in the product design process, as the scale of a given design task is often too large for a company to address in-house, meanwhile, in order to minimize the design cycle and improve design efficiency, companies routinely assign partial design task to other outside companies. In other words, they have to collaborate with their partners. In addition, interoperability is one key issue in the collaborative design working environment, the reason is that the companies and their partners commonly use different computer-aided design (CAD) systems to design product, thus, when integrating the whole design work, interoperability is indispensable.
In this research, we focus on design data exchange from mechanical CAD systems to ship CAD systems. This research is motivated by the fact that; shipyards mainly use ship CAD systems, whereas their suppliers use mechanical CAD systems to design ship equipment; thus, while integrating the entire design, the models created based on mechanical CAD systems should be imported into ship CAD systems. Therefore, it is necessary to exchange design data between these two different CAD systems. Each CAD system provides a variety of modeling units to design a complex shape, and such CAD systems, according to their own characteristics and requirements, commonly use different modeling units. Consequently, due to the distinct modeling units of each CAD system, problems always occur during the data exchange process. Hence, to address this issue, a framework for a conversion operation that consists of a direct mapping process, indirect mapping process, and an approximation technique is proposed in this study, in each conversion operation, it deals with different case.
Firstly, because a model created in a specific CAD system consists of particular modeling units, we begin by comparing and analyzing the modeling units of a mechanical CAD system and a ship CAD system, and then we map betw...