Design Change Vectors

What is a Design Change Vector (DCV)?

A Design Change Vector (DCV) captures the difference between solid models, typically 2 versions of the same design.  DCV captures this information in such a way as to enable elementary vector operations like addition and subtraction.

    Guided Tour      DCV Whitepaper  

What is the status of DCV?
  • An early-development version will be ready in August 2012.
    It will recognize and communicate design changes for most CAD models.
    It will have toolkit level capability to rescue severe integration problems. 
    ..Toolkit level meaning some custom development will still be necessary for individual cases
    If you have a challenging case please contact us at: info@k6mfg.com

  • An open beta-test starts September 2013

  • First release in early 2014

What problems does DCV solve?

Communication

DCV communicates exactly what changed and how it changed.  This is vital information for an engineer or manufacturer receiving a new version of a design.

Quality

DCV allows a designer to check his work.  It’s very easy to make unintended changes to a solid model.

Teamwork

DCV can merge the work of 2 designers working on the same solid model.  This allows a team to assign more designers to critical path tasks, improving project schedules.

Integration

DCV improves the integration between different CAD database formats.  Specifically, DCV enables tight-integration (aka close-coupled, or associativity) when using neutral file formats like STEP or IGES (aka. flat-files)

Rescuing Integration Broken integration can have very serious negative impact on a project, effecting cost and schedule.  DCV offers unique capabilities for repairing and recovering the broken integration.

Tight money

DCV inexpensively solves integration problems that would otherwise require an entire enterprise to retool their CAD applications.  So the current downturn in business spending works in our favor.

Why hasn’t this already been done?

·        Very few in the industry understand the relationship between design changes, integration, and persistent identifiers.

·        Industry leaders believed it was impossible to recognize design changes without persistent identifiers on the geometry.  CAD systems rarely  export persistent identifiers.  DCV works without any reliance on persistent identifiers.  In fact DCV can provide persistant identifiers when the export process leaves them out, thus solving a wide range of integration problems.