DISCUS has an existing software tool for analyzing Technical Data Packages (TDP), which has nearly 2,000 customers in the aerospace and defense industry, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney, and GE Aviation. As evidenced by this success, DISCUS has vast experience with transforming models, drawings, and specifications into useful information. In the current state, the DISCUS software tool provides a semi-automated approach for extracting critical information from the 2D drawing using optical character recognition.

The solution proposed by DISCUS is to enhance the current tool with artificial intelligence (AI) to focus on automatically digitizing non-graphical data in legacy part drawings. In this case, DISCUS is not just generating electronic paper, but creating semantically meaningful information that can be used for expressing part requirements when creating digital TDPs from reverse engineering.

DISCUS was recently used for a reverse engineering and additive manufacturing program at Tinker AFB where it reduced the time to extract TDP data from 80 to less than 36 person-hours (using the semi-automated extraction). With the addition of more advanced image and character recognition using AI, this time can be further reduced to less than 4 person-hours.