Configuration design technology which is based on the standard part library helps to shorten the development cycle of a product. To design a product based on the configuration design, standard parts should be parametrically modified according to the design requirements. Although commercial CAD systems have their own parametric modeling capabilities, the parametric models of parts cannot be shared by a product development project because there are many part manufacturers and many different CAD systems.
STEP is to help exchanging models between dissimilar CAD systems. But current version of STEP AP203 does not support parametric functions. The parametrics group of the STEP community is still working on a parametric STEP capability.
In this thesis, the parametric function is added to the schema of STEP AP203 using the explicit model approach. The configuration design system based on this schema has been implemented, in which a part model from the part DB can be parametrically modified, and assembled directly into a product on the Internet.
