ICAD (software)

ICAD (Corporate history: ICAD, Inc., Concentra, KTI, Dassault Systemes) is a Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) system that enables users to encode design knowledge using a semantic representation that can be evaluated for parasolid output. ICAD has an open architecture that can utilize all the power and flexibility of the underlying language.

KBE, as implemented via ICAD, received a lot of attention due to the remarkable results that appeared to take little effort. ICAD allowed one example of end-user computing that in a sense is unparalleled. Most ICAD developers were degreed engineers. Systems developed by ICAD users were non-trivial and consisted of highly complicated code. In the sense of end-user computing, ICAD was the first to allow the power of a domain tool to be in the hands of the user at the same time being open to allow extensions as identified and defined by the domain expert or SME.

A COE article looked at the resulting explosion of expectations (see AI Winter), which were not sustainable. However, such a bubble burst does not diminish the existence of capability that would exist if expectations and use were properly managed.

The original implementation of ICAD was on a Lisp machine (Symbolics). Some of the principals involved with the development were Larry Rosenfeld, Avrum Belzer, Patrick M. O'Keefe, Philip Greenspun, and David F. Place. The time frame was 1984-85.

ICAD started on special-purpose Symbolics Lisp hardware and was then ported to Unix when Common Lisp became portable to general-purpose workstations.

The original domain for ICAD was mechanical design with many application successes. However, ICAD has found use in other domains, such as electrical design, shape modeling, etc. An example project could be wind tunnel design or the development of a support tool for aircraft multidisciplinary design. Further examples can be found in the presentations at the annual IIUG (International ICAD Users Group) that have been published in the KTI Vault (1999 through 2002). Boeing and Airbus used ICAD extensively to develop various components in the 1990s and early 21st century.

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