Report from a 2013 ASME panel on geometric interoperability for advanced manufacturing

During the Summer of 2013 in a conference organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) at Madison, Wisconsin, a panel of academic, industrial, and government researchers engaged in a spirited discussion on the issue of geometric interoperability for advanced manufacturing.1 It was set in the background of heightened anxiety in various Western countries about the relative decline in their manufacturing activity and keen interest in reviving it through research and development. The Government of the United Kingdom, for example, has recently created several centers for innovativemanufacturing.2 TheUSGovernment has already set up a National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute,3 and is poised to set up several more such national institutes to spur manufacturing innovation. While the challenges these countries and their institutes face have several dimensions, the ASME panel focused on a particularly nagging technical problem of geometric interoperability that is plaguing the progress in many advanced manufacturing systems, tools and technologies. The panelists had considerable experience in the use of geometry in various design and manufacturing functions in industry. In spite of the widespread use of geometry throughout the lifespan of a manufactured product, it is the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems that serve as the dominant source for the geometric information needed in all modern Product LifecycleManagement (PLM) systems. Current CAD systems are built on the geometric and solid modeling foundations initially laid nearly 40 years ago. As the panelists described some of the industrial problems in advanced manufacturing and how they were solving them, it became clear that they are resorting to various ‘workarounds’ in the CAD-initiated representations of geometric information. The manufacturing of layered composite structures serves as an interesting and useful example of advanced manufacturing. It has all the elements that illustrate the challenges faced by modern