Description Of Ship Design Data Based On STEP

In ship design and manufacture, enterprises often choose different CAD/CAM softwares in different manufacture stages according to different requirements. At the same time, as ship design, the data of ship design must be consecutive during the product life cycle and can be used repeatedly in different stages. However, enterprises make use of different softwares which have different data structure, which leads to uniform data used in different CAD systems in different data structure. All above must come to being data redundance, data exchange difficulty and work inefficiency. It is a good idea for description and exchange of ship data and data manage in product life cycle based on STEP to reduce cost and improve efficiency.First, analysis studies on STEP are done in the paper, including origin and system structure of STEP, EXPRESS, structure of neutral file, AP216 and so on, which make provision for further research.Secondly, STEP-based system data interface is studied in the paper. Several kinds of common data interfaces are compared and a new method to exchanging data is presented. There is a new method of system data interface based on STEP. STEP neutral file is one of most frequent methods of STEP. Because neutral file is canonical and doesn't depend on any system, this kind of file is suitable for data exchange between system-A and system-B.Finally, there is an actual project application which can be used to validate above method of data interface. The example is surrounding AP216. AP216 is one of STEP application protocols which is used to deal with product data define of hull form in ship design. AP216 is an important protocol in data exchange in ship performance research. The data source of example is offset of some ship. An data-switch program is impoldered based on theory above to switch offset to STEP neutral file, then transmit this neutral file to PRO/E or SolidWorks. This example shows feasibility of the method.