PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN A COLLABORATIVE DESIGN ENVIRONMENT

This paper reports the development of a collaborative product developm ent environment using multidisciplinary analysis and design (MAD) tech nology and the information infrastructure of the WWW/Internet. The pro posed product development environment provides a two level hierarchica l setup for product development within the framework of a collaborativ e product development (CPD) system through the collocation of product designers (first level) and design services (second level). The protot ype CPD system offers the following facilities for web based product d evelopment: (2) an environment for the Visual presentation, interactiv e refinement and specification of product specifications on VRML based sharable CAD models on the web, (2) web integrated product design dat a management system for supporting CPD tasks, and (3) web based design and manufacturability analysis. The prototype CPD system has been imp lemented using a variety of commercial packages such as I-DEAS and Cas tCHECK, and programming languages such as JAVA, C, PERL and FORTRAN77 and also encompasses a collection of web servers on different computin g platforms such as SUN, DEC-Alpha and Windows NT workstations.