Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE company, is a leading global provider of PLM/CAD/CAM/CAE solutions with revenues exceeding three billion Euros and over 250,000 customers in all industries in more than 140 countries.
LEDAS Ltd. and Dassault Systèmes (DS) signed in 1999 a long-term cooperation agreement, under which we provided R&D (research and development) services to DS and integrated some of its own technologies and know-how into the following CATIA V5 and V6 products:
Technology projects developed by LEDAS for DS include a geometric constraint solver, a collision detection and resolution engine, a polygonal mesh optimizer, and a non-linear solver.
The overall volume of these contracts exceeded 100 person-years. The development work gave the LEDAS team a unique experience that enabled us to improve our competence in areas such as technology development and project management.
Bricsys is a global provider of DWG engineering design software brought to market under the BricsCAD brand. For the last two decades, the company focused on building cost-effective, mission-critical CAD tools. In 2018, Bricsys became a part of the global technology giant Hexagon AB.
In 2010-2011, in the framework of a large contract, LEDAS implemented for Bricsys a module which enabled direct modeling in BricsCAD. Shortly after that, Bricsys agreed to acquire the IP (intellectual property) rights of our products and technologies, including the LGS 2D/3D solution.
To efficiently manage and develop the acquired IP, Bricsys signed a services agreement with LEDAS to establish a wholly owned subsidiary, Bricsys Technologies Russia, and then opened a new office near our headquarters in Novosibirsk, Russia.
One of the more recent projects LEDAS completed for Bricsys was the implementation of a 3D compare function in BricsCAD based on know-how that we developed with LGC (see LEDAS Geometry Comparison).
The primary contemporary CAD challenge is how to deal with history-free geometry imported from other CAD systems, because the lack of history tree makes it impossible to change the geometry through parametric features. Variational Direct Modeling (VDM) is a technology invented by LEDAS that allows modification of the geometry by retaining the design intent and constraints. VDM was integrated into a number of CAD systems, such as BricsCAD, KOMPAS-3D, Rhinoceros-3D, and Trimble SketchUp (formerly Google SketchUp). The user base of software using VDM is several tens of thousands of users.
ASCON Group is one of the leading CAD/AEC/PLM software firms in Russia. Founded in 1989, today it has more than 100,000 installations of their products worldwide. C3D Labs is a subsidiary of ASCON that develops and markets the C3D toolkit, the core modeling component in ASCON’s flagship KOMPAS-3D MCAD (mechanical CAD) program. The C3D toolkit combines a full-function geometric kernel, 2D/3D constraint solver, CAD format converter, and a visualizer.
The LEDAS team was involved in several projects with ASCON and C3D Labs, beginning with implementing our Variational Direct Modeling (VDM) technology in KOMPAS-3D. Our software engineers then wrote innovative functions in the C3D kernel, such as converting triangulated models to B-reps (boundary representation) form, and an R&D project in geometric search for the AEC industry.