History
The original implementation of ICAD was on a Lisp machine (Symbolics). Some of the principals involved with the development were Larry Rosenfeld, Avrum Belzer, Pat O'Keefe, and David F. Place. The timeframe was 1984-85.
ICAD was ported to Unix when Common Lisp became compilable – and was then ported to the generic Unix machine (such as the Sun workstations) – expand upon this evolution.
The original domain for ICAD was mechanical design with many application successes. However, ICAD has found use in other domains, such as electrical design, shape modeling, etc. An example project could be wind tunnel design or the development of a support tool for aircraft multidisciplinary design. Further examples can be found in the presentations at the annual IIUG (International ICAD Users Group) that have been published in the KTI Vault (1999 through 2002). Boeing and Airbus used ICAD extensively to develop various components in the 1990s and early 21st century.
As of 2003, ICAD was featured strongly in several areas as evidenced by the Vision & Strategy Product Vision and Strategy presentation. After 2003, ICAD use diminished. At the end of 2001, the KTI Company faced financial difficulties and laid off most of its best staff. They were eventually bought out by Dassault who effectively scuppered the ICAD product. See IIUG at COE, 2003 (first meeting due to Dassault by KTI)
The ICAD system was very expensive, relatively, and was in the price range of high-end systems. Market dynamics couldn't support this as there may not have been sufficient differentiating factors between ICAD and the lower-end systems (or the promises from Dassault). KTI was absorbed by Dassault Systemes and ICAD is no longer considered the go-forward tool for knowledge-based engineering (KBE) applications by that company. Dassault Systemes is promoting a suite of tools oriented around version 5 of their popular CATIA CAD application, with Knowledgeware the replacement for ICAD.
As of 2005, things were still a bit unclear. ICAD 8.3 was delivered. The recent COE Aerospace Conference had a discussion about the futures of KBE. One issue involves the stacking of 'meta' issues within a computer model. How this is resolved, whether by more icons or the availability of an external language, remains to be seen. -- more work here.
The Genworks GenDL product is the nearest functional equivalent to ICAD currently available.
Read more about this topic: ICAD (software)
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