develops, and markets robots for consumer, defence, security, telemedicine, and video collaboration. Caudill and Barnhorn (2018) provided a comprehensive summary of the milestones in the 60‐year development of CATs, which is given in Table 1.1.
Table 1.1 Milestones in the 60 year history of CAD development (Computer History 2019a).
| Year | Products, developers, and features |
| 1957 | PRONTO was developed by Patrick Hanratty as the first commercial numerical control programming system. It sparked everything that is CAD, known as the building block of everything CAD. |
| 1960 | Sketchpad was developed by Ivan Sutherland as the first tool with a graphic user interface. Users wrote with a light pen on an x–y pointer display, let users constrain properties in a drawing, and created the use of objects and instances. |
| 1966 | Computer Aided Design and Drawing (CADD) was developed by McDonell‐Douglas. It was used to create layouts and geometry of designs and could be customized and improved for specific uses. |
| 1967 | The Product Design Graphics System (PDGS) was developed by Ford and used internally at Ford and its partners as CAD/CAM systems. Digigraphics was developed by Itek as the first commercial CAD system with a unit price of $500 000; only six copies were sold. |
| 1970 | SynthaVision was developed as the first available commercial solid modelling program. |
| 1971 | Automated Drafting and Machining (ADAM) was developed by Patrick Hanratty as an interactive graphics design, drafting, and manufacturing system. It was written in Fortran and designed to work on virtually every machine. Today, nearly 80% of CAD programs can be traced back to the roots of ADAM. |
| 1975 | ComputerVision by Kenneth Versprille was where the rational B‐spline geometry was added to CAD systems. |
| 1977 | CADAM was used by Lockheed to pioneer the applications of CAD in aerospace engineering. |
| 1978 | Unigraphics was developed by Siemens as a high‐end and easy to use software; it was used by many corporations and set a new gold standard for CAD software at that time. |
| 1980 | MiniCAD was introduced as the bestselling CAD software on Mac computers. |
| 1981 | Geometric Models (GEOMODs) were developed and featured geometric precision and accuracy due to the modelling capability using a non‐uniform rational B‐spline (NURBS). |
| 1982 | AutoCAD was developed by Autodesk as the first CAD software made for Personal Computers (PCs) instead of mainframe computer workstations. |
| 1987 | Pro/Engineer was developed as the first mainstream CAD tool incorporating the ideas of Sketchpad. It was based on solid models, history‐based features, and the uses of design constraints. It marked a high point in CAD history. |
| 1994 | AutoCAD version 13 was released with 3D modelling capabilities. The Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) was initially released as a new format and international standard of 3D models for data exchanges. |
| 1995 | eCATALOG was developed by Cadenas as the solution of digital product catalogs with multiple native CAD formats. SolidWorks 95 was developed by Dassault Systems as another software that succeeded in ease of use, and allowed more engineers than ever to take advantage of 3D CAD technology. Solid Edge was developed by Siemens as a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. It was Window‐based and provided solid modelling, assembly modelling, and a 2D orthographic view. |
| 1996 | Computer‐Aided Three‐Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) Conference Groupware was developed by Dassault Systems as the first CAD tool allowing users to review and annotate CATIA models with others over the Internet. |
| 1999 | Inventor was developed by Autodesk; it aimed to be more intuitive, simple, but allowed complex assemblies to be created in a shortened time. |
| 2012 | Autodesk 360 was developed whose computing was moved to the cloud. |
| 2013 | The first application (APP) for 3D CAD manufacturers was developed. |
| 2015 | Onshape was developed as a completely cloud‐based CAD program. |
| 2017 | PARTSolutions was provided by Cadenas to help manufacturers with future proof of their catalog by keeping up to date with future native formats, versions, and revisions. |
1.3 CATs for Engineering Designs
1.3.1 Engineering Design in a Manufacturing System
Design science uses scientific methods to analyse the structure of technical systems and their relationships with the environment. The aim is to derive rules for the development of these systems from system elements and their relationships. Design methodology is a concrete course of action for the design of technical systems that derives its knowledge from design science and cognitive psychology, and from practical experience in different domains.
Designs of products and processes are essential to manufacturing systems. For example, some typical activities to design a product are (i) a functional design to determine functional modules and features and their relations, (ii) a parametric design to determine geometrics and dimensions of parts, (iii) a tolerance analysis of geometric dimensioning and tolerances (GD&Ts) to determine the quality, position, and shape of all parts, and (iv) an assembly design to determine the assembly relations of parts and components.
1.3.2 Importance of Engineering Design
A manufacturing system is understood from the technological and economic perspectives. Technologically, a manufacturing system is to transform raw materials into final products via a set of operations. Economically, a manufacturing system is a process to add values to final products via a set of economic transactions associated with manufacturing processes. Making a profit is always a primary goal to entrepreneurs. The profit can be maximized in two ways: (i) to reduce costs on no value‐added activities and (ii) to increase the sale price by providing a corresponding value to the customer.
Engineering design plays a significant role in implementing these two strategies. Figure 1.7 shows the impact of the activities of design, manufacturing processes, raw materials, management, and marketing on the overall product costs. The impacts are measured by the percentages of overall product cost affected by the activities in a certain category. Even though the minimal percentage of the actual cost is related to the design activities, they mainly affect the overall product cost.