A WWW-based integrated product development platform for sheet metal parts intelligent concurrent design and manufacturing

This paper presents a WWW (World Wide Web) based integrated product develop ment platform for intelligent concurrent design and manufacturing of sheet metal parts, In order to achieve this platform, several major modules are d iscussed. These modules mainly include the structure of the WWW-based integ rated product development platform, an information integration framework, a RTCAPP (real time computer aided process planning) module, a customer inte rface module, and a design/manufacturing knowledge-based module for support ing product design and manufacturing. This paper gives the structure of the information integration framework for concurrent design and manufacturing of sheet metal parts. An information integration framework, called 'step st ructure information framework' is proposed. The principles, called 'zero th ickness and zero bend radius' are put forward, which can be used to abstrac t the geometric entities of sheet metal parts in order to facilitate produc t design and modelling. Finally, case studies are given.