Analysis Situs has academic roots. It was initially developed with the target to present CAD modeling principles to the community of Ph.D. students during the workshop on computational geometry. The idea of the software was straightforward: the user interactively picks a boundary element in the viewer to analyze the underlying geometric and topological structures. The following picture is the early-stage illustration of the principle:
Subsequent development of the software was driven by the Ph.D. work of its authors. Our research group lacked a software which would allow for easy prototyping of geometric algorithms based on precise B-Rep technique. We found that such software packages exist for mesh modeling (OpenFlipper and MeshLab are among the most famous ones) while literally, nothing similar existed for CAD modeling. The prototyping software had to possess the following qualities:
- It should be highly interactive, flexible and extensible to allow for "cognitive visualization."
- The software should allow for easy technology transfer from academia to industry. The best way to share an algorithm is to communicate its prototype.
The following list enumerates the main milestones of this story (you can read more stories here).
- November 2015: start prototyping.
- January 2016: the software was used to demonstrate B-Rep internals during computational geometry workshop in Paris.
- 2016-2017: the software was occasionally used in the educational process in Lobachevsky University, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
- September 2017: the first public paper about the software [Slyadnev et al, 2017] was presented at the Graphicon'2017 conference, Perm, Russia.
- September 2018: the plenary report on the future of FOSS geometric modeling was made at the Graphicon'2018 conference, Tomsk, Russia. Analysis Situs was used as a primary tool for demonstration.
- October 2018: starting to publish documentation at www.analysissitus.org. The goal is to make the software available for a broader community of researchers.
- Spring 2019: our paper on reconstruction of CAD models using Analysis Situs [Slyadnev and Turlapov, 2019] was selected for publishing in the proceedings of Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS.
- March 2019: Analysis Situs was used as a framework to conduct a training for software developers in prosthesis manufacturing field (Berlin). The clients were looking for an open-sourced CAD platform to ground their development on.
- August 2019: Analysis Situs was selected as a framework for development of sheet metal processing algorithms (industrial application, the company name cannot be disclosed).
- January-February 2020: the software was ported to Linux.
- November 2020: I left OPEN CASCADE company where I worked 12 years and became indie to devote more time to the project. The ambitious goal is to develop an open-source CAD platform (SDK) for solving challenging problems in the field.
- Winter-Spring 2021: start working on the commercial SDK around open-sourced Analysis Situs. Support of assemblies was added. Work on feature recognition framework was started. Also, it seemed like the right time to release ver.1.0 of the software.
- Somewhere in 2021: a good comrade and business partner integrated Analysis Situs as a backbone for CAD data processing at ascad.net. This opened the door for CAD simplification jobs for different use cases, e.g., embedding CAD data into gaming engines.
- Summer 2021: Analysis Situs was chosen as a backbone for implementing Design for Manufacturing (DfM) analysis SDK.
- 10 December 2021: together with Julia, I started a new legal entity to maintain Analysis Situs and commercial SDK around it.
- 12 March 2022: we hired our first employee to help us working on Analysis Situs and the commercial SDK around.
- Autumn-Winter 2022: one big industrial client started using and improving Analysis Situs for CFD use cases. The idea is to prepare CAD geometries designed in Catia for meshing using Salome.
- Winter 2024: release 2024.1 came out. This was the first release that we found to be quite valuable for a larger audience, so the corresponding news were shared a little further than usual (TenLinks). More people are interested, more features are coming, so the product is organically maturing. Now we are a team of six people, all making living from this project and related activities.
