Virtual Parts Engineering Research Center Workshop 

The Virtual Parts Engineering Research Initiative (VPERI), funded by the Army Research Office, focuses on building frameworks, tools, and technologies for making engineered systems sustainable and maintainable in the 21st century. This virtual engineering environment is intended to transform the engineering process, thus supporting extremely fast turnaround times for urgent part supply needs. The VPERI is in its second year of operation. Current participants included Hampton University, University of Utah, Arizona State University, and SCRA/Northrop-Grumman.

In June 2003, VPERI held its annual workshop at the Design Automation Lab at Arizona State University. The purpose of the meeting was two-fold:

1. To review and critique progress made on current VPERI projects.
2. To formulate a vision of Legacy Systems Engineering and identify technology gaps requiring future research

The workshop was by invitation only. Apart from current VPERI members, personnel from key industry and government agencies were invited to attend this 2-day workshop. Most of Day 1 was spent in reviewing the current projects. This was followed by industry presentations. The workshop attendees then broke up into 4 discussion groups to assess technology gaps in each of the following areas: Geometry data acquisition/reconstruction, Engineering analysis/re-engineering, manufacturing planning & part production, and Product data acquisition, organization, exchange standards.

The VPERI research teams (Arizona State University, Hampton University, and University of Utah) have demonstrated an example of reverse engineering of a legacy gear box.

The major findings and concerns of the discussion groups are presented in Section 3. Each of the 4 groups contributed to a detailed articulation of the ongoing needs for basic research (to overcome the current technology limitations), and the development of several critical technologies. The lack of compatibility of the disparate tools currently available, and the present obstacles to the integration of “clever-point solutions” were emphasized as serious hindrances to advancing CAD/CAM capabilities. It was also noted, that much needs to be done to implement an acceptable coupling of CAD and CAM.