Developing an integrated intelligent framework to support an engineering change process for an axial piston pump

Since the concepts of concurrent engineering were introduced in mid 1980s, the product design process has become complicated. This is because many fac tors related to the life cycle of the product may need to be considered dur ing the design stage. Therefore, shortening product development time become s important for the survival of an enterprise. In this paper, an integrated intelligent environment to support concurrent engineering is proposed. Two major modules are provided by this system to assist change management. One is a constraint network module that analyses the related constraints about a design change to find the design variables influenced. Another is a prod uct assembly module that extracts the design data from a CAD database to an alyse the spatial relationships relating to an assembly. The data in the ab ove two modules are integrated in a data integrated module, in which an ent ity relational data model was developed to describe the integrated data. Fi nally, a web-based query system was developed to provide a multiplatform en vironment for the user to refer to the data in the constraint network modul e and the product assembly module during a design change process. The propo sed environment is implemented in the design change process for an axial pi ston pump.