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.