Information modeling for additive manufacturing: ISO 10303 AP 242

Today, every company needs to manage the information that will guide it in making the decisions that shape its future. Therefore, processes, organizational models, and any procedures that involve specific information and lead to certain decisions must be properly managed. The company's very structure is subject to a range of information and/or characteristics that should be organized. Just as "organizations" must be organized, the information used to manufacture a physical product (object) must also be properly organized. This includes information systems, intelligent systems, concurrent engineering, knowledge engineering...To ensure that a company's information can be used by other collaborating companies, standards have been created to enable communication. The ISO 10303 standard, better known as STEP, is the international standard that fulfills the objective of standardizing the methods that enable what is called "interoperability." This is a very broad standard with many sections and applications.