STEP-Compliant Application Framework for Virtual Prototyping

The paper presents a formal approach to prototyping of products in virtual reality environments. Virtual prototyping of products is considered as a consistent simulation and visualization process mapping the source product model into its target visual representations. The approach enables to interrelate formally the product and visual information models with each other by defining mapping rules, to specify a prototyping scenario as a composition of map instances, and then to explore particular product models in virtual reality environments by interpreting the composed scenario. Having been realized, the proposed approach provides for the strongly formalized method and the common software framework to build virtual prototyping applications. As a result, the applications gain in expressiveness, reusability and reliability, as well as take on additional runtime flexibility. Being oriented on STEP family standards for the computerinterpretable representation and exchange of product data throughout the whole life cycle, both the presented general approach and the developed software framework allow a lot of potential applications for different industry branches. These domain-unified solutions are illustrated by the applications developed for virtual construction and geophysical exploration purposes. The applications enable users to analyze complex multi-disciplinary information in virtual reality environments. The work is supported by RFBR (grant 04-01-00527) and Russian Foundation for Science Support (http://www.sciencesupport.ru).