Communication de Ahmed Ismail à l’occasion des rencontres Connect! organisées par Speckle.
Webinaire en ligne, du 19 au 21 octobre 2021, rediffusion bientôt disponible.
Titre : Interoperability via open source developments
Résumé:
This presentation tells the story of the first connector developed outside of the Speckle community. A Speckle Connector for TopSolid is being developed at the Laboratory of Numeric Cultures for Architectural Projects (CNPA), part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. TopSolid is a CAD-CAM software that is known in the industrial engineering world, and especially in the wood industry, for its integration of the complete process from design to manufacturing and its exact Geometric Modeling based on Parasolid. TopSolid is also used by a number of large AEC contractors as soon as manufacturing is concerned. . The vision is to establish a Libre interoperability solution between TopSolid and other AEC software by developing a Speckle Connector, as well as a Rhino.Inside Plugin.
This presentation will expose the development method, based on the analysis of the current situation of the AEC industry, way behind the more successful case of industrial engineering. This action-research started by establishing real world use-cases to address the issue of interoperability in AEC and the possibilities of providing a link between AEC tools and industrial engineering tools. The development, which is .NET based and written in C#, started by creating the link between the Host software (TopSolid) API and Speckle’s (respectively Rhino’s), before putting in place the needed converters progressively, growing in complexity over time. The development state is currently work in progress and the objective to be able to test it on more complex examples to achieve the goals set of a more fluid interoperability. The presenters will also cover the difficulties encountered, linked to the specifity of the different APIs involved, how they tackled them. This project is coordinated by Ahmed Wael, from the CNPA & PhD Candidate at MHA Lab/ENSAG/UGA (Grenoble, France), with the collaboration of Thomas Hächler, from the CNPA and founder of Platform5 in Switzerland.