A Translator For File Format Exchange Based On Parallel Computing

With the improvement of the computer technology, CAD technology has rapid developed as well. In the CAD 3D mechanical design areas, there has been lots of 3D mechanical design software used for many areas. Such as UG, Catia,Pro / E, SolidWorks, Inventor, SolidEdge, JT, etc. According to the characteristics of each industry and the habit of different individuals, the different companies or designers used different software. Even they used the same CAD software but the familiarity about the software is different. So it's clearly, different software will cause the difficulty of interoperability among company and individuals on the design. In order to make a good use of the advantages of different software, the data exchanging technology become more and more important and urgent in this area. From a research of some US company which specializing in a variety of CAD file format exchange. There are approximately 20 billion dollars need to be invested on the word each year for the exchange among various CAD file to deal with the issue of data error and construction delay and research. However, due to historical reasons and different development purposes, the internal data recording and data dealing with in variety of CAD mechanical design software are in different way, and the software develop language is different also. Therefore, the data exchange between the different software is an important and difficult issue today.In order to improve the ability to share different data info among CAD software, ISO and some relevant institutions on CAD data exchanging and sharing, has made a series of standard formats such as STEP , IGES, CGM, etc.. In principle, these standards file format can solve the problem of dada exchange among different CAD systems file format. But actually, there are still many problems about file format translation since the diversity of CAD software and the complexity of the CAD model file. It's a realistic and significant issue to share data, exchange data among several of CAD software. Implementing the CAD file format translation is the primary task for data exchange among CAD / CAM / CAE / CAPP, PDM. Meanwhile, researching on CAD file format translation technology has important value for sharing resources, saving design costs and improves development efficiency.This article analyzed the common used data translation method between 3D mechanical design software in the data exchange .And then according to the characteristics of 3D mechanical design software file structure, we use the method of B-Rep (boundary representation) for the solid model as the basic data structure, and implemented a new file format translator for 3D mechanical design software. By using this new file format translator, the number of file format translator from the current n (n-1) reduced to n + 1. Also in the implementation of this new file format translator, we use the parallel computing for file translator in the multi-core processor environment. According to the test results, the parallel computing method can significantly improve file format translator efficiency in the multi-core processor environment. At last we use this file translator in Parasolid and Inventor, through the exchange of a large number of 3D models. We verified the feasibility of this system.