LEDAS Responds to D-Cubed

Latest issue of weekly e-newsletter upFront.eZine contains a Guest Editorial written by Dmitry Ushakov, Director of Product Management, LEDAS Ltd. It is a letter sent by Dmitry to Ralph Grabowski, the editor of upFront.eZine, in response to the paper “All About D-Cubed's 2D DCM” published in the previous issue of upFront.eZine. The paper included the interview with Neil Howarth, the business development manager for the D-Cubed Components business of Siemens PLM Software. In his interview Dr Howarth mentioned LEDAS Ltd. as “a relatively recent entrant [on the market for geometric constraint solving components]”.

In his response letter Dmitry briefly described the 11-year history of LEDAS Ltd. and the 7-year history of its LGS 2D component, a direct competitor of D-Cubed’s 2D DCM. He also pointed out the primary difference between LEDAS and D-Cubed: the latter is a part of a big vendor, Siemens PLM Systems, while LEDAS is independent. LEDAS technologies are completely available to any CAD vendor, because LEDAS does not produce its own CAD system and therefore does compete with its customers.

Along with recognition of Dr. Owen’s (founder of D-Cubed) remarkable contribution to the field of geometric constraint solving, Dmitry pointed out other pioneer researchers in this field and explained why there are just a few commercial geometric constraint solvers on the market. Dmitry presented LEDAS academic licensing program aimed at providing constraint solving technologies to universities for free and gave an example of the ongoing research at Purdue University (USA) in the field of CAD user interfaces based on LEDAS technology component LGS 2D.

Dmitry gave several examples of LEDAS customers who embedded technology components into custom CAD systems or exploit LEDAS mathematically-skilled team to develop proprietary key components. A new kind of collaboration for LEDAS was a joint project with Open Design Alliance, a non-profit consortium of over 2,000 software developers, aimed at integration of LGS 2D geometric constraint solver into their Teigha platform, to have the full compatibility with the DWG 2010 file format.

Dmitry also shared the vision of increasing use of 3D solvers as the engine for a new generation of direct modelers. As direct modelers become more popular, the question becomes how to keep design intent in a history-free environment. To answer the question, LEDAS is now developing its "variational direct modeling" (VDM) technology that is available for free evaluation as a plug-in for McNeel & Associates' Rhinoceros direct modeling software.

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