The Quest for a PC CAD Viewer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes
By Mike Clare, BCA IS - CAS CPD, New Technology, Tools & Processes

The need for PC CAD Viewing at Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) came into existence due to an initiative called "No 2D", later renamed to "3D Only". The premise of this project was to finally take full advantage of our rich 3D data to, not only perform digital mock-up but, fabricate and validate as well. When we determined that most part types already took advantage of the 3D data throughout the business stream, there was no obvious reason to produce 2D drawings. The most common and difficult question to answer was, how will our suppliers and customers, downstream of engineering, have the ability to view the parts they are required to work with or produce? There was a potential need for thousands of installations in Boeing Commercial Airplanes. We needed a low cost, PC based application that will give users the ability to obtain all information needed to create and validate parts throughout the Boeing business stream.

The need for this tool was vital to the success of the 3D Only initiative, without the tool Boeing would not be able to realize the tremendous cost savings of 3D Only. The key components of the viewer were platform, cost and ease of use. This tool would not be accepted by non-CAD users unless it would run on their existing workstations, for very low cost, if not FREE, and it also had to be very easy to use. The 3D Only team presented this to their management team and obtained approval to proceed with the creation of the "Low End Viewer" project.

The Low End Viewer (LEV) project started in June of 1997 with representation from virtually every major discipline in Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality Assurance, Materiel, Customer Service and Information Technology. This team put together high level requirements and surveyed the market for viewers that would be able to satisfy the major requirements. Some viewers obviously were more capable than others. Back in 1997 there were plenty of viewers on the market already but very few read CATIA V4 data without translation into another format, and this was a critical requirement of the team in order to satisfy our FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) commitments. The major requirements that were initially sought after were documented as a simple list of "one liners" in order to quickly communicate the needs to potential vendors. Some of those requirements are listed below.

• Must read Native CATIA data without data translation
• Microsoft Windows based application
• Must work with current Boeing desktop PC configuration (1997)
• 233 Mhz
• 128MB RAM
• 4GB hard Drive
• NT 4.0 Operating System (Look how far we have come in 6 years, this requirement has obviously been updated)
• Easy to use (4hr. or less to train)
• View full CATIA models without the ability to modify the released product authority data.
• Full rotation and panning of the 3D model
• Measure accurately to (4) decimal places on any geometry selected
• Read and interact with all tolerance and annotation created in the FD&T function.
• Section anywhere
• Create mark-ups to facilitate producibility and design checks
• Print/Capture shaded or line art images

The team needed an inexpensive way to view CATIA data in order to replace the traditional 2D drawing. "Working Together" with IBM and Dassault Systemes allowed us to submit requirements via COE to obtain the proper solution to the business problem that was presented. The solution proposed by Dassault Systemes and IBM was to use a V5 level product called DMU at the P1 level of functionality. The configuration that was agreed upon by the LEV team consisted of three workbenches, DMU Navigator, DMU Space Analysis, and DMU Tolerance Review. These three workbenches satisfied 100% of our priority 1 requirements and most of the priority 2 requirements. Over time the team submitted more than 150 detailed requirements to Dassault Systemes, and over a seven month span the team had deployed a pilot in our fabrication unit. This coincided with a pilot the 3D Only team was executing to validate their processes on a 737 wing rib post (complex machined part).

There were many issues that had to be resolved in order to release this software in an efficient manner for our users to load and become productive with this tool. Boeing Commercial Airplanes had never released a production CAD / CAM product on a PC platform prior to this, so the LEV project team had to develop the baseline architecture for deploying and maintaining the application. This needed to be accomplished in order to obtain the proper software accreditations to utilize the tool for fabricating and inspecting flight worthy hardware.

Through a great team effort with all involved, the LEV system was released for production use at Boeing in the third quarter of 2000 at the V5R2 Service Pack 7 level of code. The current release BCA is operating at is V5R10 Service Pack 3. There are over 200 installations of the Low End Viewer currently in Boeing and it is used across many Boeing divisions in Philadelphia, Wichita, and many Seattle area sites. Many Boeing suppliers (approximately 40) have also stepped up to working in a 3D environment and purchased copies of ENOVIA DMU P1 in order to accept 3D Only work. At Boeing, 3D Only data is visualized using the ENOVIA DMU P1 product (LEV). The ENOVIA DMU P1 product (LEV) is currently a Boeing standard for visualizing CATIA data on standard desktop hardware.

For further information on ENOVIA DMU P1 feel free to contact me at
michael.t.clare@boeing.com