The Digital Metrology Standards Consortium said the American National Standards Institute has approved its Model-Based Characteristics v1.0 standard as an American National Standard. Formally designated DMSC MBC v1.0-2026 and subtitled "Persistent Identification and Related Digital Practices," the standard specifies a machine-readable way to name and exchange product characteristics inside the digital engineering model itself, replacing the manual interpretation of engineering drawings that has long sat between design and inspection.
At its core, MBC assigns a persistent, human- and machine-readable identifier to every product characteristic. That identifier follows the characteristic across engineering, manufacturing, inspection, and quality systems, and it carries a criticality classification and a link to the verification plan. Engineers who reconcile inspection results against a drawing will care about that link, because it lets the same feature be tracked from design intent through measurement without re-keying or reinterpretation.
The standard builds on Model-Based Definition and complements DMSC's Quality Information Framework, the XML schema published as ISO 23952:2020. Where QIF moves measurement plans, results, and part geometry through the supply chain, MBC supplies the identifiers those systems point at. In other words, it closes the gap between what a model says a characteristic is and what an inspection report claims to have measured.
ANSI approval means the standard cleared a consensus-based review involving industry, government, academia, and technology vendors. DMSC president Curtis Brown described standardized characteristics as the "critical connection points" that push the digital thread all the way to the product definition. The consortium expects early uptake in aerospace, defense, automotive, medical device, and industrial equipment work, where verification requirements are strict and ambiguity in a drawing is expensive. Software developers, metrology providers, and systems integrators can now build against a fixed target.
The open question is whether MBC follows QIF's path from an American National Standard to an international one. QIF 3.0 was harvested into ISO 23952:2020 in August 2020, and DMSC has said it will keep working with standards organizations and government agencies to move MBC toward the same footing. The MBC 1.0 specification is available now for download from qifstandards.org.
