WWW-based collaborative system for integrated design and manufacturing

In today's competitive business environment, a product development is the r esult of a team effort involving a multi-disciplinary group of designers, m anufacturers, even supplier and customer representatives. Effective collabo ration among Various groups is important for reducing cost and product deve lopment time. Hence, the aim of our study is to develop a WWW-based collabo rative system for integrated design and manufacturing. The proposed system is composed of three modules-collaboration, design, and manufacturing. This paper focuses on its collaboration module and the design module. Its manuf acturing module is discussed in References [1] and [2]. The collaboration m odule is WWW-based platform-independent and provides a Virtual collaborativ e environment for a part designer to perform on-line communication with cus tomers and manufacturers via the Internet. All participants in the collabor ative environment can view, and manipulate the solid model of the design pa rt as well as discuss their concerns on-line interactively. The design modu le utilizes the design by features approach to construct a part. Traditiona l design by features systems restrict the designer to a fixed set of predef ined features provided by the system vendor. The proposed design module inc ludes an extension mechanism for designers to create user-defined features and an evaluation mechanism for designers to perform manufacturability eval uation. The design module is able to generate a very complicated user-defin ed feature and to provide feedback concerning potential manufacturing probl ems in the early design stage. Both proposed modules have been implemented on a Sun workstation using the ACIS geometric modeler C++, and JAVA.