Advanced Technologies for Discrete-Parts Manufacturing

DoD agencies are facing growing challenge of maintaining aging Warfighter Systems, while reducing procurement costs of discrete-parts. One key hindrance to ensuring readiness is discrete part procurement. When procuring parts, tech data package which is provided to the suppliers during pre and post-award contains raster drawings which are often of very poor quality. Several suppliers do not provide bids because, it requires them to expend considerable time to develop 3D models from these drawings, and often that the drawings are un-readable. Imaginestics proposes research and commercialize a Supplier Productivity System which includes 1) A semi-automated system to stitch raster drawing views from multi-page sheets to produce a single composite drawing sheet 2) A semi-automated system to convert 2D raster drawings to 3D CAD model. 3) Extraction of dimensions and manufacturing related attributes from the raster document and associating with the 3D CAD model 4) Enabling suppliers to easily find and download 3D CAD model for a given Technical Data Packages (TDP) using procurement meta-data or simply the shape on the drawing from VizSpace (an online hosted service) According to DLA’s internal survey, commercialization and deployment of above proposed R&D will reduce procurement cost of each discrete part by almost 27%.