Welcome to Aerospace PDE 2002, the fourth edition of the annual Workshop on Aerospace Product Data Exchange which is jointly organised by the European Space Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This event follows up on three previous editions which were known as the "NASA STEP for Aerospace Workshop" (NASA-GSFC in July 1999, NASA-JPL in January 2000 and January 2001). From 2002 onwards, it is intended to organise the workshop alternately in Europe and in the US.

Workshop objectives

• To provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of methods and technology for reliable exchange and long term archival of aerospace product data -- in particular through the use of open standards.
• To share experience obtained in the development, implementation, deployment and operational use of such standards.
• To identify or showcase product data standards that can be (or actually are) used in aerospace applications, but which have originally been developed for other industry sectors.
• To identify gaps where new standards need to be developed or existing ones need to be extended -- and to bring together the people to start such initiatives.

Workshop themes

• Open data exchange standards to enable collaboration between industrial and/or institutional partners
• Open data exchange standards for realisation and improvement of concurrent engineering and "e-engineering" scenarios
• Open data exchange standards to enable multi-disciplinary / multi-physics design and analysis
• Dedicated Session on Open Standards for Engineering Analysis, with special focus on STEP AP 209 and related standards, including the Engineering Analysis Core Model (EACM) and the new ISO 10303 parts 50, 51, 52 and 53 for mathematics, representation of fields, structured and unstructured meshes and numerical analysis -- organised jointly with NAFEMS
• Advances in robust, industrial STEP-based CAD, CAE, CAM and PDM data exchange
• Success stories and (educational) failures (!) in developing, implementing and/or using open standards
• Reliable long term archival of aerospace product data
• Combining the best of STEP and XML, e.g. STEP for precise semantics and XML for effective software implementation, including web-based data access
• Combining product data standards with standards for exchange of large amounts of analysis or test results data, such as HDF5 and netCDF
• Combining open data standards and the open source software (OSS) development model for effective implementation
• Linking design and analysis to manufacturing
• Linking engineering design and analysis to testing and simulation