Towards an Open-Source Industry CAD: A Review of System Development Methods

Abstract

Due to the industry knowledge barrier, general computer aided design (CAD) software cannot do everything in digital manufacturing by itself, and industry CAD, therefore, occupies a crucial position in the CAD industry. To develop industry CAD smoothly, open-source is the best choice. We analyzed recent examples of industry CAD development and divided the development methods into four types: development based on the graphics development environment, development based on geometric modelling kernel, secondary development based on general CAD, and hybrid development. We analyzed the characteristics of various methods and believe that the method based on the hybrid development of the geometric modelling kernel and the graphics development environment is the best open-source industry CAD development method. We proposed a system architecture of open-source industry CAD for reference and conducted a preliminary exploration of the reference architecture to verify its feasibility.