Virtual Parts Engineering Research Center Workshop
The Virtual Parts Engineering Research Initiative (VPERI), funded by the Army Research Office,
focuses on building frameworks, tools, and technologies for making engineered systems sustainable
and maintainable in the 21st century. This virtual engineering environment is intended to transform
the engineering process, thus supporting extremely fast turnaround times for urgent part supply
needs. The VPERI is in its second year of operation. Current participants included Hampton
University, University of Utah, Arizona State University, and SCRA/Northrop-Grumman.
In June 2003, VPERI held its annual workshop at the Design Automation Lab at Arizona State
University. The purpose of the meeting was two-fold:
- To review and critique progress made on current VPERI projects.
- To formulate a vision of Legacy Systems Engineering and identify technology gaps
requiring future research
The workshop was by invitation only. Apart from current VPERI members, personnel from key industry
and government agencies were invited to attend this 2-day workshop. Most of Day 1 was spent in
reviewing the current projects. This was followed by industry presentations. The workshop attendees
then broke up into 4 discussion groups to assess technology gaps in each of the following areas:
Geometry data acquisition/reconstruction, Engineering analysis/re-engineering, manufacturing
planning & part production, and Product data acquisition, organization, exchange standards.
The VPERI research teams (Arizona State University, Hampton University, and University of Utah)
have demonstrated an example of reverse engineering of a legacy gear box.
The major findings and concerns of the discussion groups are presented in Section 3. Each of the
4 groups contributed to a detailed articulation of the ongoing needs for basic research (to overcome
the current technology limitations), and the development of several critical technologies. The lack
of compatibility of the disparate tools currently available, and the present obstacles to the
integration of "clever-point solutions" were emphasized as serious hindrances to advancing CAD/CAM
capabilities. It was also noted, that much needs to be done to implement an acceptable coupling of CAD
and CAM.
