On June 22, 1999 LEDAS Ltd. and Dassault Systemes (DS) signed a Cooperation Agreement based on the previous three years of cooperation history between DS and the Russian Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence.
The cooperation between two companies is organized as a series of contracts (supplements) aimed at integrating the LEDAS solutions into CATIA Version 5 software. The supplements included development and maintenance of a powerful mathematical constraint solver, implementing end-user solutions based on this solver, extension of the user shells functionality according to the needs of DS customers, and research projects intended to prepare future constraint-based industrial solutions. Since 1999, in the framework of the Cooperation Agreement, 11 contracts have been successfully fulfilled.
One of the solutions developed by LEDAS for CATIA Version 5 was issued with V5R8 release of the system and integrated into CATIA Knowledge Advisor — to enhance this CATIA product, which allows users to embed knowledge into designs and leverage it to maximize productivity of engineering decisions by design automation and reducing human errors. When designing a product with CATIA Version 5, a user comes across a system of mathematical equations to be solved. Whatever these equations (linear or not) are, CATIA provides user with a resolution method — a «SetOfEquations» capability accessed through the Knowledge Advisor workbench. It is based on original mathematical solver developed and maintained by the LEDAS programmers.
Another end-user solution developed by LEDAS, called Constraint Satisfaction, was integrated into the CATIA Product Engineering Optimizer and issued with V5R10 release. Its key advantage is to solve not only pure mathematical functions, but also CATIA measures and other black-box functions for mathematical solver. Solving capabilities are provided with new constraint satisfaction algorithms — know-how developed by the LEDAS mathematicians.
"LEDAS Ltd. combines high competence in software development, constraint programming, and mathematics. Since 1999, these skills have been applied within a Cooperation Agreement between Ledas and Dassault Systemes," said Stéphane Declée, VP R&D Strategy & Research, Dassault Systemes. "LEDAS proved its capability to effectively perform a full cycle: from profound research to integration of the intelligent, high performance solutions into the CATIA releases, and then to - their reliable maintenance. Our continued cooperation with LEDAS always has the objective to deliver high value to our CATIA customers."
As a private company with its proprietary technologies, solutions, experience, and a high-skilled team, LEDAS is open and ready to cooperate with all partners that need modern constraint-based technologies to add new value to their solutions.