Research and Application of Two-way Integration Technology of 3D CAD and PDM System
October 08 09:03:00, 2025
Modern manufacturing enterprises have significantly enhanced their product development capabilities and market competitiveness by leveraging computer technology, information technology, and CAX (Computer-Aided Engineering) technologies. However, this technological advancement has also introduced new challenges. On one hand, the design data and technical documents generated during the product design process have experienced an explosive growth, making data management increasingly complex. On the other hand, different departments within the enterprise often use separate systems that lack effective information exchange and conversion, leading to the formation of "information islands." These issues have severely hindered the application of CAX technologies in enterprises and have become a major bottleneck for business development.
To address these challenges, Product Data Management (PDM) systems were introduced. As an integrated platform for enterprise product development information, PDM manages data generated by various software tools throughout the product lifecycle. It collects information from different application systems, facilitates information sharing among software tools, and establishes a global information integration platform for the enterprise.
The integration of CAX and PDM systems has become a top priority in enterprise informatization. Among the various integration approaches, the bidirectional integration of 3D CAD and PDM systems is the most demanding and complex. This paper explores the principles and key technologies involved in achieving such integration.
There are three main modes of integration between CAD and PDM systems:
1. **Application Packaging Mode**: In this mode, all CAD applications are encapsulated so that different systems can share information. The PDM system manages the feature data and files generated by these applications. While this mode offers low automation, it is simple to implement and is commonly used for integrating 2D CAD with PDM systems.
2. **Interface Switching Mode**: This involves using APIs provided by CAD software to extract product structure information and component constraints. This data is then transferred to the PDM system, allowing for asynchronous updates between the two systems. This mode offers higher automation and is suitable for 3D CAD integration, but it requires more development effort.
3. **Tightly Integrated Mode**: This mode allows for full bidirectional data exchange between CAD and PDM systems, including product data, feature data, and application data. It ensures consistent product assembly relationships and structure trees across both systems. However, this mode is complex and typically only available from software vendors.
This paper adopts the interface switching mode to achieve bidirectional integration between 3D CAD and PDM systems. It enables the batch upload of product structure information and related documents from the CAD system to the PDM system, while also allowing the CAD system to read and update data from the PDM system. This creates a two-way asynchronous data exchange between the two systems.
The overall system architecture includes functions for data upload and download. During data upload, temporary data processing, BOM data upload, and model document upload take place. For data download, BOM data, model documents, and product structure trees are retrieved and updated in the CAD system.
Key technologies involved in the integration include 3D CAD API functions, data exchange technology, document management, and rights management. The use of APIs enables efficient extraction of product structure and attribute information. XML formatting ensures uniform data exchange, while compression, encryption, and coding techniques help manage large volumes of documents securely.
Rights management ensures that users only access the data they are authorized to see, protecting sensitive company information. This includes user rights, BOM rights, and document rights management.
An application example using SolidWorks illustrates how the integration works in practice. Designers can upload BOM and attribute data directly from the CAD system to the PDM system, and retrieve previously stored components for reuse, improving efficiency and reducing redundancy.
In conclusion, the integration of 3D CAD and PDM systems through the interface exchange mode effectively addresses information isolation, reduces redundant work, and enhances the efficiency of product development. Practical implementation demonstrates the feasibility of this approach, and the modular nature of the interface-based integration makes it adaptable to different CAD systems. This lays the foundation for future enterprise data integration platforms.