A DISTRIBUTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE CONCURRENT PRODUCT DESIGN SYSTEM THROUGH WWW/INTERNET

Abstract

It is widely recognized that the design process commits about 70 percent of the total life cycle cost of a product. Concurrent Engineering is the commonly employed technology to achieve reduction of production cost and production time while improving the quality of products. Although Concurrent Engineering can offer substantial benefits, and hence many companies are beginning to take a strong interest in the collaborative approach, it is not yet clear how it can best be implemented. While there is substantial evidence of a major rise in the use of the Internet, there is, as yet relatively little work done on how these technologies can be used, within a corporate setting, to support distributed Concurrent Engineering. The present research is motivated to address some issues in Distributed Concurrent Engineering (DCE). This research addresses a key requirement in DCE, namely, the ability for geographically dispersed and disparate parties, having heterogeneous computing platforms, to exchange design and manufacturing data. The development of an effective and efficient collaborative product design support environment based on WWW /Internet is reported. A new method that reduces the transmission time through the use of macro files is proposed to realize real-time communication. This research also reports the implementation of a monitoring methodology for synchronizing group operations, and maintaining consistency of shared CAD models in a cooperative design review modifying process. Based on the proposed methods, a software interface has been developed to extend the traditional single-location CAD software system to a multi-location application for coordinated product design through Internet. This software interface was coded in Java. The architecture is a connection-oriented client/server structure using TCP/IP protocol. Unigraphics on UNIX Workstation and MicroStation on Windows NT have been successfully integrated. The findings of this research would allow product designers to exchange and share product data, communicate with team members, modify geometry data on particular aspects of the design, and maintain operations consistency in all the distributed cooperative sites on a wide variety of platforms. Such an approach offers the promise of improved communication and hence enhances the product development process.