Motivation

Many standard parts, such as those from military specifications or from vendor catalogs, are used in products designed by Raytheon. Often, the designer creating a CADDS model of a product will have to create models of each of the standard parts used in the product. These parts are created over and over again by different designers. Some designers have built their own libraries of these parts, but other designers don't know about these libraries, and have no way of finding out about them. The result of all of this is a large number of parts that have been duplicated many times, costing valuable disk space and creating extra work for the designers.

The CADDS5 Family of Parts software offers an opportunity to eliminate much of this effort. These often-used standard parts can be created using this software and stored in a standard location so that people can find them. Also, because of the design of this software, only one master part has to be created for each family of standard parts, and the CADDS5 software will generate the rest from information provided in a text file. This will save a large amount of effort by the designers. Also, since these parts are generated by CADDS5, the parts don't have to be created until they are needed in a project. Once the project is complete, the parts can be removed, this saving a large amount of disk space. One estimate of the usage on a set of computers shared by three different Raytheon plants showed over 6500 parts currently on disk, using over 10,600 megabytes of space. Since parts are archived onto tape and removed from the disks when they are not needed, the number of parts that have been created is much larger than this.

Last Modified: Wed Aug 28 14:41:29 EDT 1996