Standard for Exchange and Transfer (SET):

The interface SET is standard for the exchange of all of data which is produced for CAD/CAM. This is a French development and was first published in the year of 1984 (SET 85). Many additions have been published since (SET F88, SET S 88 and SET V88).

The information transferred using the SET interface is wire-frame, surface, B-representation and FEM models, in addition to scientific data and technical drawings. Organizational, material property and tolerance information may not be described by individual models but they ought to be contained in the drawing for transfer.

SET permits the exchange of data among different CAD/CAM systems and also among CAD/CAM systems and central data banks. It features a much more common data structure than IGES; data is hold in a very compressed form. Therefore, the neutral file size is much smaller and the processing time is much shorter than for IGES.

The structure of a typical SET file is illustrated in Figure. The delimiters of the file are BEGIN and END blocks. The BEGIN section has administrative data and other information of a general type.

Figure: Structures of a SET Data File

The END section defined the total number of blocks stored in the SET file. The file is structured from assemblies that contain a series of blocks; the blocks can be nested and hold the CAD information that has to be transferred. There are different kinds of information units defined.