Product Development in a Collaborative Design Environment

Abstract

This paper reports the development of a collaborative product development environment using multi-disciplinary analysis and de sign (MAD) technology and the information infrastructure of the WWW/Internet. The proposed product development environment provides a two level hierarchical setup for product development within the framework of a collaborative product development (CPD) system through the collocation of product designers (first level) and design services (second level). The prototype CPD system offers the following facilities for web based product development: (1) an environment for the visual presentation, interactive refinement and specification of product specifi cations on VRML based sharable CAD models on the web, (2) web integrated product design data management system for supporting CPD tasks, and (3) web based design and manufacturability analysis. The prototype CPD system has been implemented using a variety of com mercial packages such as I-DEAS and CastCHECK, and programming languages such as JAVA, C, PERL and FORTRAN77 and also en compasses a collection of web servers on different computing platforms such as SUN, DEC-Alpha and Windows NT workstations