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 iViP Association is pursuing a concept of performing quality assurance for STEP implementations in parallel with their development phase. The ProSTEP iViP 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 interoperability of the available STEP products with a special objective on the examination wheter a schema change (up to the IS schema) has taken without any impairment of the quality of processors performance. The variety of tested STEP processors will be enlarged again by new products for additional CAD systems. The 8th ProSTEP iViP Benchmark, particularly evaluated capabilities for product data exchange with respect to geometry and extended validation properties. Because of the participation of two new STEP translators the exchange of assemblies were tested again, but with a new test model.

In January 2001 the AP214 standard was completed by the ISO and achieved the status of an International Standard (IS). The 8th Benchmark was performed using the STEP translators that were available by the end of April 2003. Most of the translators were used in their IS (International Standard) versions. During the current year all the others will become IS (International Standard) as well.

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.