STEP Evolution and Extensions for Sustainable Manufacturing

The objective of the project is to help U. S. manufacturers quickly incorporate sustainability technologies by partnering with industry to develop and validate standards for seamless information exchange between engineering, production, and manufacturing business functions. Existing standards, such as the STEP standard for product data, can be made compatible with new information technologies and updated to deal with current and future sustainability issues.  This project addresses the problem of evolving the STEP standard to bring it in line with emerging IT technologies developed by the Object Management Group and the World Wide Web Consortium.  New methods and tools are needed to allow existing manufacturing data standards, such as STEP, to take advantage of these new technologies. Once that is done, these standards can be extended to meet priority needs such as supporting sustainable manufacturing.

A key factor in the success of an enterprise is efficient information management. Increasingly, manufacturing enterprises are implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to meet the demand for information exchange. New technologies including knowledge-based integration, ontologies, and semantic web infrastructure are providing the basis for significant advances in information exchange. Enabling reuse and interoperability between these technologies is a critical requirement. The STEP and related ISO TC 184 SC4 Industrial Data standards have been under development for two decades and provide rich source of consensus-based, domain-specific information models. Adapting the best of these existing data models and combining them with new technologies has significantly improved efficiencies in engineering enterprises.

The Object Management Group (OMG) produces both general information technology and domain-specific standards. OMG technologies for information modeling and implementation are in widespread use and offer many advantages over STEP. Activities are already underway to bring some of the ISO STEP general information technology to OMG by morphing the ISO EXPRESS information modeling language, in which STEP is specified, into a language within the suite of OMG technologies. NIST has been involved in that process as it is a foundation technology for manufacturing and supply chain integration.

The approach to be taken by the project is twofold. First, the project will define a process and implement migration tools enabling enterprises to adopt/adapt STEP for their software systems integration needs. Second, the project will create a reference example executing the harvesting process using the migration tools thereby validating both. Given the objectives of the project to relate ISO STEP and OMG standards, the reference example will be within the Systems Engineering domain and will take advantage of existing collaboration in the ISO STEP, OMG, INCOSE communities.