Web-based design and manufacturing support systems: implementation perspectives

With the great progress of web technology in the past few years, many appro aches have been proposed to implementing web-based systems for design and m anufacturing. However, the implementation of the approaches and associated systems is not an easy task because design and manufacturing are normally s ophisticated engineering operations. In this paper the authors present an e ngineering approach for implementing web-based design and manufacturing sup port systems. The implementation issues are critically discussed with an ex emplar-a web-based bearing design support system developed by the authors. These issues include design information integration, remote execution of th e systems, use of Java programming, client - server architecture, open comp uting and user interface design, and the human - computer interaction aspec ts.