Ten CAD challenges

We discuss the significant technical challenges facing the CAD industry and research community and present an approach to address these issues. The key component of all CAD applications is the end user. Users' success or failure in interacting with CAD products ultimately governs the success of the products themselves. We extend the meaning of interactive techniques for this article to include more than low-level input device, display, and human factor issues. We deliberately include the way users work with applications to accomplish a work task. Using this extension we define three difficult challenges with interactive techniques: geometry shape control; interoperability across CAD, CAM, and CAE applications; and automatically morphing geometry in a meaningful way during design optimization.

Brief CAD History

CAD was one of the first computer graphics applications in both academia and industry. Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the DAC-1 project at General Motors both started in the early 1960s. Industry developed its own CAD applications, delivered on multiuser mainframes, in the late 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s turnkey systems bundled hardware and software. Current CAD implementations separate hardware and software components. As a result, CAD software most often executes locally on powerful Unix or Wintel workstations with specialized 3D accelerator hardware and stores data on distributed servers.