ISO Industry day in Hershey:
The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) Metrology Project Team (MEPT) and the 
International Standards Organization (ISO) Technical Committee 184 (TC184) for STEP 
Manufacturing held a joint meeting on Wednesday Oct 25th in the context of a broader 
set of meetings of the ISO held during the week of the 25th in Hershey, Pennsylvania.  
Akram Yunas of the AIAG MEPT called for the meeting.  John Horst (MEPT and NIST), 
Akram Yunas (AIAG), and Martin Hardwick (TC184 and STEPtools) defined the agenda and 
procured appropriate speakers. The audience at the joint meeting consisted of about 
20 - 30 attendees, mostly ISO TC184 (STEP Manufacturing) committee workers from Sweden, 
Germany, Japan, France, Korea, Australia, and the US, along with AIAG MEPT representatives.


The purposes of the joint meeting were 1) for the MEPT and the TC184 to inform one another 
of activities that were perceived to be of interest to the other, 2) to discuss possible 
joint or individual tasks to encourage mutually beneficial activity between the two 
organizations, and 3) (particularly) to begin to define a set of phased stages of the 
implementation Geometrical Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) concepts using an appropriate 
open, non-proprietary standard (probably one or several of the existing ISO STEP standards).  
The latter purpose was key, since both organizations believe that the implementation of an 
open, non-proprietary standard for CAD + Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) downstream 
to machining, inspection, casting, forging, etc. is the main missing element for realizing 
cost savings from interoperability.

In light of the former purpose, Robert Waite (MEPT and Daimler Chrysler), John Horst (MEPT 
and NIST), John Coski (MEPT and Daimler Chrysler), and Steve Peca (MEPT and Ogihara) 
presented the work of the AIAG MEPT.  Waite presented an overview of MEPT and the work 
on DML, Horst presented the standards development model of the MEPT and relevant results 
from the International Metrology Interoperability Summit (IMIS) 2006, Coski presented the 
new Quality Measurement Data (QMD) standard, and Peca presented work on a Scan Data 
specification.  On the TC184 side, Christine Hermetet-Filez of AFNOR in France gave an 
Airbus presentation on its requirements for tolerances in next generation CNC machining. 
Martin Hardwick of STEP Tools, Inc. gave a demonstration of the results of a closed loop 
machining test using AP-203 Edition 2 tolerance data prepared by Boeing, and an Okuma 
machine tool with a probing system owned by Boeing.

In light of the latter purpose, Len Slovensky (TC184 and Northrop Grumman) presented GD&T 
in the context of the various STEP Application Profile (AP) standards, like AP224, AP219, 
and AP238.  All of these STEP standards are targeted to non-inspection operations, excepting 
AP219, which does address inspection, but is limited to inspection results reporting.  It 
became clear that the several standards/specifications under the oversight of the MEPT, 
namely, I++ DME, DMIS, DML, QMD, and Scan Data, will generally fit well within the context 
of the appropriate STEP APs, with some overlap.  It has been identified that a key item of 
joint effort is to enable and encourage the implementation by CAD vendors and process 
planning vendors of CAD + PMI data sufficient for process planning in an open, non-proprietary 
format that is complete, correct, and unambiguous. Presentations were given by a variety of 
GD&T-for-inspection-application experts, to define phases of implementation for GD&T for 
inspection.  A presentation by Bill Tandler (Multi Metrics), delivered by Ray Admire, 
dovetailed in with the other related presentations by Curtis Brown and Kim Summerhays, both 
delivered by Gordon Hogg (Dimensional Metrology Standards Consortium (DMSC) and Daimler 
Chrysler) and Lockheed Martin (delivered by Ray Admire). The audience appeared to be most 
interested in these presentations.  That interest was again evidenced by discussion following 
the meeting, at which it was suggested that NIST attempt to get the metrology and GD&T 
community to agree to a common definition of phases for stages of GD&T implementation for 
inspection using the efforts begun in preparation for this meeting. 

