The automotive industry as a key user group for CAD systems, recognizing product data representation and exchange as a matter of high strategic importance for the future, has made tremendous efforts to create an international standard for automotive design data, the STEP AP214 (ISO 10303).

Under the motto ”creating quality instead of checking quality”, the ProSTEP Association is pursuing a concept of performing quality assurance for STEP implementations in parallel with their development phase. The ProSTEP Benchmark provides CAD system vendors with an opportunity to measure the quality of their STEP processors against the requirements of the user as they relate to day–to–day usage.

The goal of the Benchmark is to examine the compatibility and scope of the implementation of the available STEP products. To enhance this goal the Benchmark comes with new thematic and organizational aspects.

The 6th Benchmark includes the themes ”stability”, draughting and PDM. This means that three separate Benchmark parts will be realized and published.

This, the first part of the 6th Benchmark, the ”Stability” Benchmark, particularly evaluated capabilities for product data exchange with respect to processor handling and geometry and the new topics validation properties and 3D-text annotation. Open issues from the previous Benchmark, the 5th Benchmark, were also verified (e.g. part names, colours, layers).

The ”Stability” Benchmark was performed using the STEP translators that were available at the end of June 2000. The translators were used in their DIS versions. DIS (Draft International Standard) is the stage, STEP AP214 has reached becoming an International Standard, and replaces the CD (Committee Draft) stage.

At this point we would like to thank all the participating system vendors whose kind donations of hardware and software made the Benchmark possible. All the same we appreciate the effort of the vendors providing the appropriate geometry test cases.