CATIA Development
Central to the digital design approach was the CATIA system. CATIA was developed by Dassault Systemes of France and marketed by IBM in the United States. From the beginning of the 777 program, the three key participants in the system -- Boeing, Dassault Systemes and IBM -- developed a "working together" agreement signed by their respective chief executive officers.
The three companies made a commitment in the agreement to deliver products and services on schedule to the 777 program computer-users.
The possibilities this technology provided required Boeing to rethink the entire process of designing and building an airplane in order to leverage these capabilities to their maximum extent.
The company found that several enhancements to the CATIA system were required to allow engineers to design an entire airplane using these new processes. Boeing applications enhanced the CATIA system in three major areas:
- data management,
- user productivity and
- visualization.
Each of these major enhancements was required to deal with the size and scale of productively managing the millions of 777 airplane parts modeled on CATIA. Once all of the computing applications were in place, Boeing engineers and designers were able to use the three-dimensional digital software to see parts as solid images and then simulate the assembly of those parts on the screen, easily correcting misalignments and other fit or interference problems.