Automatic Acceptor Generation based on EBNF Grammar Definition

The impact of simulation software packages in the development of components is increasing. In the casting industry software tools for 3D CAD, material data, structural analysis, nondestructive testing (NDT) and durability analysis are used. They are parts in the numerical process chain developing cast components, in which various information must be exchanged. The simplest form of the process chain is the linear flow. However, it reaches its full performance only with the methods of Simultaneous Engineering (SE). The overlapping of workflows is the characteristic feature of the SE and requires fast and robust communication between software tools. Currently, the numerical process chain in the casting industry is missing some interfaces between important software packages. As a first step the paper proposes an automatic acceptor generator as a solution to address this challenge. The acceptor generator only requires the syntactic definition to check the data format of an input file. The method is based on the syntax description of file formats as an application of context-free grammars (CFG). In this context using the extended Backus-Naur form (EBNF) notation a file format can be completely syntactically defined. As a proof of concept for the acceptor generator, the data output of a material simulation is checked for syntactic correctness. The conversion information added by syntactic description might be used for development an interface between the material and structural simulation software package. The only requirements will be the EBNF description of the grammar as well as the conversion information. The procedure based on this general approach will close the gaps in the numerical process chain. It can be used to implement other missing interfaces between software tools, too.