What is a Design Change Vector (DCV)?

A Design Change Vector (DCV) captures the difference between solid models, typically 2 versions of the same design.  DCV captures this information in such a way as to enable elementary vector operations like addition and subtraction.

    Guided Tour (PDF)     White Paper (PDF)    

What is the status of DCV?

DCV is being re-written.  The previous implementation ran on a native STEP data model.  That required implementing too much low-level solid modeling logic.  The new implementation will translate to/from STEP (or IGES) but will implement on a 3rd party solid modeling engine.

A schedule will be posted here by June 2012.

What problems does DCV solve?

Communication	DCV communicates exactly what changed and how it changed.  This is vital information for an engineer or manufacturer receiving a new version of a design.
Quality	DCV allows a designer to check his work.  It’s very easy to make unintended changes to a solid model.
Teamwork	DCV can merge the work of 2 designers working on the same solid model.  This allows a team to assign more designers to critical path tasks, improving project schedules.
Integration	DCV improves the integration between different CAD database formats.  Specifically, DCV enables tight-integration (aka close-coupled, or associativity) when using neutral file formats like STEP or IGES (aka. flat-files)
Tight money	DCV inexpensively solves integration problems that would otherwise require an entire enterprise to retool their CAD applications.  So the current downturn in business spending works in our favor.

Why hasn’t this already been done?

·        Very few in the industry understand the relationship between design changes, integration, and persistent identifiers.

·        Industry leaders believed it was impossible to recognize design changes without persistent identifiers on the geometry.  CAD systems rarely  export persistent identifiers.  DCV works without any reliance on persistent identifiers.  In fact DCV can provide persistant identifiers when the export process leaves them out, thus solving a wide range of integration problems.