An Internet-enabled integrated system for co-design and concurrent engineering

Abstract

In order to facilitate the product design and realisation processes, in this paper, an Internet-enabled system has been developed to support collaborative and concurrent engineering design by seamlessly integrating three functional modules, i.e., co-design, Web-based visualisation and manufacturing analysis, based on some state-of-the-art Java and Web technologies. In the co-design module, designers are equipped with co-modelling and co-modification facilities to carry out a design task collaboratively. The Web-based visualisation module provides a portal for users, who are not involved in the co-modelling process directly, to view and analyse a design part conveniently. Services in the manufacturing analysis module can be invoked by users dynamically to evaluate and optimise the manufacturing costs and the manufacturability of a design part so as to implement the concurrent engineering methodology during a co-design process. This system can be used for a design team geographically distributed to organise a 3D collaborative and concurrent engineering design effectively, and the proposed distributed and integration architectures enable the system to be generic, open and scalable. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.