08feb13b

CTC's Dr. Gerald Radack was honored recently when he received the prestigious 2007 International William J. Conroy Standards Professional
Award at a meeting of the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO's) Subcommittee (SC) 4 of ISO Technical Committee (TC) 184 in Irving, Texas. The award is traditionally presented each year at an ISO TC184/SC4 meeting held in the United States. The award recognizes individuals from the ISO 10303 (known as STEP, the STandard for the Exchange of Product model data) technical community who have shown exceptional leadership in the development or implementation of Product Data Exchange standards.

TC 184/SC 4, Industrial Data, is responsible for standardizing representation and exchange formats and data exchange methods for technical data, including data on individual products, parts libraries, and data warehouses. ISO 10303 is the international standard for describing a product throughout its lifecycle. It includes methods for representing design, manufacturing, operation, and maintenance data. STEP supports data exchange as well as long-term archiving.

Dr. Radack is a Principal Computer Scientist in CTC's Logistics Integration Directorate. He is located in Havertown, Pennsylvania. Dr. Radack has been a leader in the development of Product Data Standards for over 15 years. Within ISO TC 184/SC4, he serves as Convenor of its Working Group 3 (WG3 - Product Modeling). This is the largest working group within ISO TC184/SC4, responsible for developing and maintaining two standards: the Application Protocols and Application Modules of ISO 10303, Product data representation and exchange, (STEP) and the ISO 15926, Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities, (Oil & Gas) standard.

In addition to his leadership of WG3, Dr. Radack has also been personally involved in the development of several ISO 10303 standards supporting multiple industries, including Application Protocol AP 215 for Ship Arrangements, AP 216 for Ship Moulded Forms, AP 218 for Ship Structure, and AP 227 for Plant Spatial Configuration, AP 223 for Castings, and AP 229 for Forgings. He also was the lead on developing Usage Guides for AP 212 for Electro-technical Design and Installation and a Usage Guide for AP 227 specifying how to use this standard for the transfer of piping, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), or cableway product models.

Dr. Radack has been active in other development areas within SC 4, including the development of ISO 13584, Parts Library (PLIB). Dr. Radack serves as editor of the ISO 8000-100 series on Master Data Quality and of ISO 22745 Open Technical Dictionaries and their Application to Master Data (OTD). He is co-project leader of ISO 29002, Exchange of Characteristic Data. His expertise has assured the success and consistency of standards for product model and parts library exchange. He has also served as a very effective liaison from ISO TC184/SC4 to other international organizations, including ISO TC 37, Terminology and other language and content resources, and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32, Data Management and Interchange.

Besides helping develop the standards, Dr. Radack has played a key role in numerous proof-of-concept and prototype implementations of the standards. In addition to his standards work, Dr. Radack has been involved in design and implementation of various logistics applications at CTC.

CTC has been an active participant in TC 184/SC 4 since the early 1990s, when it developed an architecture for a suite of STEP APs on near net shape process for producing discrete parts and began developing APs for cast, forged, and pressed metal parts.

PDES, Inc. sponsors the Conroy Award, which was established in 1997 by the US Product Data Association (US PRO) Board of Directors in honor of William J. Conroy. Visit the Conroy Award: http://pdesinc.aticorp.org/conroy_award.html

Subcommittee (SC) 4 Wins Eicher Leadership Award

The standards committee in which ISO 8000 and ISO 22745 are being developed--ISO TC 184/SC 4--also has been recognized by ISO for its work in developing standards for the exchange of industrial data. Subcommittee (SC) 4 was honored through the presentation of the Lawrence D. Eicher Leadership Award at the 30th ISO General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. CTC's Dr. Gerald Radack and Barry Frye serve as members of SC 4.

The Eicher Award is acknowledged as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in ISO standards development worldwide. Each year, the Eicher Award provides recognition for superior performance by one of the ISO standards development groups. The award was set up in 2002 by the ISO Council to honor the memory of the late Dr. Lawrence D. Eicher, ISO Secretary-General from 1986 to 2002. Past recipients include ISO's subcommittee responsible for the development of ISO 9001 and the subcommittee responsible for developing MPEG and JPEG. Visit the Eicher Award: http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1076

CTC's commitment to quality is also exemplified by its early participation in the national and international standards-setting organizations and its subsequent ISO 9001 (Quality) and 14001 (Environmental) certifications. CTC was one of the first nonprofit research and development organizations to simultaneously certify to both the ISO 9001 and 14001 international standards, achieving this distinction in 1998. Since that time, additional locations have been added to the certification scope and all locations conform to ISO practices and procedures. See CTC's Quality Commitment: http://www.ctc.com/learnaboutctc/quality.cfm

CTC's quality system has been further enhanced through product-specific certifications such as the AS9100 certification for all aerospace activities, and CTC was successfully assessed using the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) at Maturity Level 3 of the CMMI-SE/SW^SM, Version 1.1, for systems and software engineering activities.

For more information about the work of ISO Subcommittee (SC 4), contact Dr. Gerald Radack, 610-449-3853, radack@ctc.com, or Barry Frye, 814-269-2729, fryeb@ctc.com.