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This article smells like a software person looking at CAD from a technical standpoint without significant experience with complex product development or product

This article smells like a software person looking at CAD from a technical standpoint without significant experience with complex product development or production. The reality is, the processes around CAD (namely R&D iteration, tooling production, fabrication and assembly process iteration, management thereof) cost far more than CAD does. In short: who cares if something is single threaded when you are paying literally 100 times that person's salary per day in idle equipment, space and so forth? It's a rounding error. Buy a faster machine. The industry broadly agrees with the author that greater integration between factory floor equipment and digital models is desirable and/or coming (Industry 4.0, etc.) however the complexity of this space is staggering. To briefly explain: every fabrication process (or 'unit' operation in process management terms) has theoretical abilities in terms of part generation, modification or assembly but these are limited by equipment at hand (speeds, tolerances, tooling compatibility, maximum and minimum dimensions, etc.), time, knowledge/training, material and other inputs. Furthermore, equipment-specific maintenance schedules, power requirements, failure modes, consumable replacements and environmental parameters cannot be ignored. And that's before you have to look at aggregate tolerances, lasting effects of these processes on part materials, variations caused due to environmental conditions, temporary storage and movement of parts and inventory during production, secondary processes, human error, regulatory ingress, supply chain complexities, etc. Typical products may include somewhere between 5-100 unit operations to produce, some can take 1000s or 10s of 1000s, especially if you include electronics fabrication, packaging and testing. Individual tooling assemblies often take months to produce, even years if multiple iterations are required. It's not something you use a single program to plan for. You need an experienced team, time, money and a plethora of systems.

johnwalkr 5y ago
I was going to write a similar comment. The CAD part of mechanical engineering is usually a really small part of the overall process. Furthermore, there are really good tools in existing CAD to act as "pointers", they just aren't necessarily how a computer scientist would invent them. They are usually called configurations and indeed they can be automated. Normally "32 instances of a part" would not need to be manually updated either, one update would do it. Finally, it's naive to think simulation is analogous to CI. In some cases it can be pretty close to automated, but normally there is a lot of expertise and interpretation required to get useful results and there are a lot of steps between or instead of simply inputting geometry to the simulation program. It's true that interoperability and version control should be improved, but configuration control is more important and engineers like the author are the ones that try to parameterize too much and cause hidden mistakes and extra work for everyone else.

johnwalkr 5y ago

I was going to write a similar comment. The CAD part of mechanical engineering is usually a really small part of the overall process. Furthermore, there are really good tools in existing CAD to act as "pointers", they just aren't necessarily how a computer scientist would invent them. They are usually called configurations and indeed they can be automated. Normally "32 instances of a part" would not need to be manually updated either, one update would do it. Finally, it's naive to think simulation is analogous to CI. In some cases it can be pretty close to automated, but normally there is a lot of expertise and interpretation required to get useful results and there are a lot of steps between or instead of simply inputting geometry to the simulation program. It's true that interoperability and version control should be improved, but configuration control is more important and engineers like the author are the ones that try to parameterize too much and cause hidden mistakes and extra work for everyone else.