The Product Development Company (PTC) announced the availability of CADDS 5i R14, a design solution for the shipbuilding industry as well as other large assembly manufacturers to support their product development challenges. This new product release helps customers reduce time to market and lower development cost with enhancements in performance and visualization delivering new capabilities for routed systems and manufacturability checks. CADDS 5i R14 is supported with a new version of CADDS 5i workgroup management software, Optegra 8, which helps engineering teams work together more effectively.

Improved visualization delivers greater flexibility in display states through advanced rendering techniques and zoning within the design environment. Working with shaded 3D models reduces the ambiguity of the information, clearly displays the effects of changes and possible interferences, and enables image capture for easy communication with multiple departments. Additionally, the designer can clip specific areas to reduce the complexity of what is displayed which allows a clearer visualization of the model.

Performance improvements allow designers to work faster increasing productivity. The enhanced Assembly Tree improves model interaction with a more flexible structure, facilitating concurrent engineering. This also makes it easier to understand the product’s complex structure. Structural drawing improvements also increase user performance. Users can quickly focus on the parts they are interested in and easily remove hidden lines. Drawing enhancements also include additional support of shipyard standards for section, panel and other structural drawing output and the possibility to view routed systems by sections to simplify drawings.

Advanced Routing for Shipbuilders improves design flexibility by allowing the creation of complex duct and cableways. Designers can more easily edit and copy individual or multiple pipe or duct segments without having to regenerate the whole network saving significant amounts of time. CADDS 5i R14 allows users to create irregular branched systems improving the utilization of all available space and the quality of the design. Finally, there are checks in the software during the design of routed systems to provide feedback to the user on manufacturability of the design.