Bloomberg News is reporting this morning that the use of two different versions of CATIA 3D CAD software—versions that are incompatible at the file level—is largely to blame for significant delays on the Airbus A380 project.
“Airbus Vows Computers Will Speak Same Language After A380 Delay,” says the headline.
Software used to manage the design and manufacture of the 555-seat A380 at Airbus's Hamburg engineering center isn't fully compatible with that used at company headquarters in Toulouse, France, say current and former Airbus executives, including Charles Champion, who headed the A380 program until September. That's why hundreds of small changes to electrical wiring in the A380 snowballed into at least a year’s delay in delivering the world's biggest passenger aircraft and $2.5 billion in lost profit. Airbus Chief Executive Officer Christian Streiff may announce additional costs or longer delays for the A380 in coming days. The board of Airbus parent European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co. meets today in Amsterdam.
The incompatible software products are CATIA V4 and CATIA V5, 3D CAD software from Dassault Systèmes. It is no secret that these two versions of CATIA are incompatible at the file format level, and it is nothing new for a CAD software company to update a file format in such a way that compatibility between versions breaks down. We know this well in AEC. Autodesk changes AutoCAD’s DWG format with every two or three annual releases. Bentley is still guiding customers through the transition between MicroStation V7 and V8 formats, even though MicroStation V8 first came out in 2001.
It would be easy to blame Dassault for this mess by criticizing their decision to change the file format in CATIA 5. Easy, but wrong. Doing so sends a really dumb message to software vendors: Don’t Innovate. How much productivity and new functionality would be lost from CATIA V5 if Dassault had stuck with the internal file format of the previous version? Quite a bit. Sometimes you just have to jump the chasm.
Read complete article, "Lessons For All CAD Users From the Airbus CATIA Debacle."
--RSN