Joint LOTAR and MBx-IF Workshops
The close collaboration with the MBx Interoperability Forum is a key success factor for the LOTAR project. It ensures that industry requirements are validated and harmonized across domains before they become part of the EN/NAS 9300 series of standards, helps to improve the maturity and robustness of the underlying information models, and enhances support for the LOTAR-relevant scope in STEP interfaces.
In this context, more than 50 participants from user companies, software vendors, and government and research organizations met online in 27 sessions over the course of five days between 14-18 March 2022. The workshops included parallel technical team meetings as well as joint plenary sessions for project updates and status reports.
The LOTAR workgroups utilized the availability of experts from all domains to work on new and updated parts for the EN/NAS 9300 series of standards as well as to discuss cross-domain topics such as meta data for archive packages, or common processes. Joint sessions were held with the respective Interoperability Forums’ user and implementor groups.
The CAx-IF and EWIS-IF wrapped up their latest rounds of testing during the week and determined their scope of work for the coming six months. In addition to upgrading implementations to STEP AP242 Edition 3, scope extensions such as assembly-level PMI or the use of globally unique identifiers were the focus of discussions.
The meeting was concluded by the MBx-IF Roundtable, which provided a comprehensive overview of the latest accomplishments and offered STEP vendor update presentations from nine companies.