ISO 10303 - History

History

The evolution of STEP can be divided into four release phases. The development of STEP started in 1984 as a successor of IGES, SET and VDA-FS. The initial plan was that "STEP shall be based on one single, complete, implementation-independent Product Information Model, which shall be the Master Record of the integrated topical and application information models". But because of the complexity, the standard had to be broken up into smaller parts that can be developed, balloted and approved separately. In 1994/95 ISO published the initial release of STEP as international standards (IS) with the parts 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 101, AP 201 and AP 203. Today AP 203 Configuration controlled 3D design is still one of the most important parts of STEP and supported by many CAD systems for import and export.

In the second phase the capabilities of STEP got widely extended, primarily for the design of products in the aerospace, automotive, electrical, electronic, and other industries. This phase ended in the year 2002 with the second major release, including the STEP parts AP 202, 209, AP 210, AP 212, AP 214, AP 224, AP 225, AP 227, AP 232. Basic harmonization between the APs especially in the geometric areas was achieved by introducing the Application Interpreted Constructs (AIC, 500 series).

A major problem with the monolithic APs of the first and second release is that they are too big, have too much overlap with each other and are not sufficiently harmonized. These deficits lead to the development of the STEP modular architecture (400 and 1000 series). This activity was primarily driven by new AP covering additional life-cycle phases such as early requirement analysis (AP 233) and maintenance and repair (AP 239), and also new industrial areas (AP 221, 236). New editions of the previous monolithic APs on a modular basis have been developed (AP 203, 209, 210). The publication of these new editions coincide with the release of the new ISO product SMRL, the STEP Module and Resource Library, in 2010 that contains all STEP resource parts and application modules on a single CD. The SMRL will be revised frequently and is available at a much lower cost than buying all the parts separately. At the end of 2010 the seventh Change Request (CR) of the SMRL has been worked out.

In mid 2010 the development of the new major AP 242 Managed model based 3d engineering was initiated. The first edition of AP242 is expected to be technically complete in 2011 and is dedicated to replace the most successful STEP APs 203, 214 and other APs in the mechanical design area in an upward compatible way. In particular it will contain major updates in the area of Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, Kinematics, and Tessellation. Future editions of AP242 will extend the scope further into areas such as electrical harnesses.