Why LOTAR?


Mission, Objectives & Scope

Mission

It is the mission of LOTAR International to develop global standard based archival and retrieval mechanisms for digital product and technical information. The project will achieve this through the ongoing harmonization and standardization efforts of Aerospace and Defense organizational affiliations. As part of the goals for archival and retrieval, the project will seek to enable data exchange and interoperability mechanisms to ensure long term use of digital product and technical information.

Objectives

The LOTAR International Project is a working group, supported by the AIA and PDES, Inc. in the US, as well as ASD-STAN and the prostep ivip association in Europe. These hosting Organizations and their responsibilities within the LOTAR project are described in detail below. The project goal is to develop, publish and maintain standards designed to provide the capability to archive and retrieve digital product and technical information, including 3D CAD and PDM data, in a standard neutral form that can be read and reused throughout the product lifecycle, independent of changes in the IT application environment originally used for creation. The multi-part standard covers both the information content and the processes required to ingest, store, administer, manage and access the information.

Scope

The project is initially scoped to provide a long term archive and retrieval solution within the standards mechanisms (EN / NAS 9300 Standards Documents). It does not develop application or hardware solutions except for prototyping and validation purposes. Further, the project is scoped to product data and practice standards and recommendations in the aerospace and defense industries.

The wide range of digital product and technical information is divided up into 3 technical work phases:

  • Phase 1: Create EN / NAS standard documents and recommended practices regarding fundamentals & concepts, processes and the first data domain explicit 3D CAD.
  • Phase 2: Create EN / NAS standard documents and recommended practices regarding long term archive and retrieval of 3D CAD with PMI, PDM, 3D CAD composite, 3D CAD electrical harness, 3D Light Visualization, governance and planning, functional architecture, security and LOTAR certification for aerospace and defence companies to be measured against.
  • Phase 3: Create EN / NAS standard documents and recommended practices regarding system engineering, simulation, 3D CAD with parametric & form features, PLM (as extended PDM) and analysis.

These phases are accompanied by close cooperation with vendors to encourage availability of products that implement the standards.