Knowledge Technologies International, ICAD

Knowledge Technologies International (KTI) is the world's leading provider of object-oriented engineering software solutions for the aerospace, automotive, industrial equipment, and construction industries. KTI chose the Allegro CL development environment for its highly successful ICAD System, used by such prominent customers as General Motors, Ford, Jaguar, Mitsubishi, and Honda.

"The problems we solve," explains KTI's Vice President of Development Bob Phillips, "demand that we have a development tool that is scaleable, industrial-strength, and robust. Allegro CL has worked very well for us."

Allegro CL's Dynamic Objects technology has enabled KTI's software systems to handle the highly complex requirements of its customers, and produce results faster than ever thought possible. For example, British Aerospace uses the ICAD System to model and evaluate airplane design elements.

"Previously we could analyze only two nose shapes on a new aircraft project because each one took 5 weeks," explains Steve Allwright of British Aerospace. "Using ICAD we are now able to evaluate upwards of sixty-five shapes, because each one takes only 10 minutes."

KTI's customers are thus able to close the design technology gap by automating the concept phase of a new design project, where 80% of the project cost gets committed. By capturing the knowledge of project engineers in a Dynamic Objects modeling language, ICAD enables engineers to truly automate all repetitive tasks, build applications that capture best practices, and institutionalize routine operations to create a 'virtual product model' that can be reused for future projects.

The secret to this highly powerful modeling capability? Allegro CL's Dynamic Objects technology. For the ICAD product, the KTI team built a sophisticated object-oriented modeling language on top of the Common Lisp Object System, taking advantage of the dynamic object-oriented programming of Allegro CL. With this modeling language, KTI's software systems can handle highly complex engineering environments, rapidly model sophisticated designs, and incorporate changes in a dramatically shorter time.

Says Phillips, "Allegro has given us tremendous flexibility for our dynamic object modeling paradigm. Other development tools such as C++ would not enable us to deal with objects in such a flexible, dynamic way. With Allegro CL, we have the power to deal with real-world engineering systems, and deal with real-world problems in ways that are just not possible with other systems."