Collaborative Design System for Electromechanical Products

Based on an increasing need of life cycle perspectives in product and production development, there is a call for more effective working methods for the reconfiguration, rearrangement, retro-fit and reuse of current equipment, systems and processes within production systems. This chapter discusses the need and character of such methods based on current research and industrial practice in production system design and development. A concluded development process is illustrated by a double helix development cycle for the production system and the product. The traditional life cycle illustration of product and production system design is in this case altered to a double helix where the same design phases of requirement analysis, alternative synthesis and alternative analysis reoccur for each project phase of conceptual design, detailed design, validation and industrialization/running-in, but for each development cycle on an elaborated level.

The casting process CAD system developed based on the existing three-dimensional CAD software has many inadequacies. This paper innovatively puts forward the steel castings three-dimensional casting process CAD system based on neutral STEP file. In this study, by taking advantage of universal CAD data-exchange standard STEP format for data exchange, a practical three-dimensional CAD system was developed based on Open CASCADE Geometry Kernel. The system has the function of practical casting process modeling, including design and modeling of gating system and riser design and so forth. The system exceeded the deficiencies of the existing casting process CAD system. It resolves the foundry Enterprises dependence and limitations on the type and version of commercial 3D CAD software, enabling to realizethe integration of CAD and CAE on casting process.

The team design becomes increasingly important to future manufacturing industry. This paper focus on the key issues of collaborative 3D design system through Internet or Intranet in CSCW(Computer Support for Cooperative Work). In the paper, we propose our solutions of concurrency control tactics, collaboration aware, multi-mode communications network management, synchronous real-time protection in a collaborative 3D design system. Based on open source projects-open CASCADE and Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE), we implement our collaborative 3D design system, and experiments show our system can meet the requirements of some 3D cooperative modeling design applications.

Representation and share of part feature information in web-based parts library

The authors review and categorize the research in applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and expert systems (ES) in new product development (NPD) activities. A brief overview of NPD process and AI is presented. This is followed by a literature survey in regard to AI and ES applications in NPD, which revealed twenty four articles (twenty two applications) in the 1990–1997 period. The applications are categorized into five areas: expert decision support systems for NPD project evaluation, knowledge-based systems (KBS) for product and process design, KBS for QFD, AI support for conceptual design and AI support for group decision making in concurrent engineering. Brief review of each application is provided. The articles are also grouped by NPD stages and seven NPD core elements (competencies and abilities). Further research areas are pointed out.

Service-Oriented architecture (SOA) has increasingly becoming an architectural evolution as one of the software design principles. This paper proposes an architecture design of an online collaborative agreement signing system based on SOA. The advantages over traditional designs are loose coupling, scalability and flexible combination of services. Web service model of the proposed solution is also described. Electronic seal and digital watermark are discussed as the domain knowledge as well. Sample software based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology on .NET platform is introduced in the last part of the paper.

After analyzing the requirement of large-scale equipment installation, both the functions and the faults of asynchronous collaborative design system and synchronous collaborative design system were discussed. And then, a combined collaborative design platform, which combined the product data management system with the synchronous collaborative design system, was proposed. A framework for the combined collaborative design platform was put forward. The product data management system and the synchronous collaborative design system were discussed in detail. And then, the strategies for sharing and exchanging of product data and information were presented. Operation steps of the combined collaborative platform were described in detail. Finally presented was a case study that using the combined collaborative design platform in electric dust collector installation.

The concept of time in traditional distributed systems has been inherited in the Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) literature. The following assumptions have generally been made: (1) Events are atomic and their durations do not matter. (2) Total ordering of events can be achieved by some mechanical algorithm. (3) The relationship between events is determined solely by time (causal relationship). However, we observe that these assumptions are not appropriate if the goal is to faithfully preserve user intentions in collaborative systems. In particular, we discuss why and how these assumptions should be relaxed or removed in the design of collaborative editing systems.

The design of satellite orbit usually requires several space scientists that are responsible for different aspects of satellite orbit, such as orbital elements, satellite attitude. In order to make the result of design more intuitive and understandable to every involved space scientist and improve the efficiency of satellite orbit design, a real-time collaborative satellite orbit design system is developed. By introducing P2P structure, this system can be deployed in a local area network without the installation of backend server. By adopting message queue, the system can avoid potential inconsistency caused by the concurrent operation by different space scientists. Through this system, space scientists can easily exchange their designs for the satellite orbit in the local area network. Also, this system could guarantee the confidentiality of satellite orbit design and the fluency of network connection.

Conventional Product Data Management (PDM) supports aspects of information management but don’t promote the application of target oriented design methodologies like ‘Axiomatic Design’. For Manufacturing System Design PDM has to manage the actual targets, to direct a target-oriented procedure, and to manage objects for evaluation. Targets result from customers and manufacturers. The definition of ‘Functional Requirements’ and ‘Design Parameters’ has to be organized between different core competencies at different times and places. The goal is the configuration of a PDM framework supporting distributed collaborative manufacturing system design in a ‘Axiomatic Design’ oriented way. Based on an axiomatic approach, the implementation of this methodology in a distributed PDM framework is presented. For this, the necessary procedure and controls of ‘manufacturing system design’, information architecture and data interfaces to other software tools are considered and then the paper describes necessary metamodel.

In order to facilitate product realisation processes, presently, research is actively being carried out to develop methodologies and technologies to support geographically dispersed teams to organise collaborative design based on the quickly evolving information technologies. A number of research works and commercial systems have appeared to provide solutions for collaborative and distributed product development, and the practical applications are getting more pervasive and mature. In this paper, the recently related works are summarised from three aspects—visualisation-based collaborative systems, co-design collaborative systems and CE (concurrent engineering)-based collaborative systems. Around these aspects, about 100 papers and 30 commercial systems/international standards published or launched recently are discussed. The current research and development statuses and issues, underlying algorithms, mechanisms and system architectures, and the future trends and challenges are explained and compared in detail.

A collaborative design system architecture based on ontology is proposed. In the architecture, OWL is used to construct global shared ontology and local ontology; both of them are machine-interpretable. The former provides a semantic basis for the communication among designers so as to make the designers share the common understanding of knowledge. The latter which describes knowledge of designer's own is the basis of design by reasoning. SWRL rule base comprising rules defined based on local ontology is constructed to enhance the reasoning capability of local knowledge base. The designers can complete collaborative design at a higher level based on the local knowledge base and the global shared ontology, which enhances the intelligence of design. Finally, a collaborative design case is presented and analyzed.

The paper explores the key problems in CAD collaborative design of distributed synchronization. According to the characteristics of AutoCAD, the transmission of real-time operation command is replaced by modified underlying database, which improves the transmission speed of concurrent collaboration and reduces errors of real-time transmission. The paper presents the structure of the whole collaborative design system and expounds some key techniques of it, including the interface, data transmission, conflict elimination, fault disposal, etc.

As a result of analysis of the technical difficulties of cold roll-forming and the requirements of a collaborative design system for cold roll-forming, the physical four-tier structure of the cold roll-forming system is proposed. And then the architecture of a multi-agent based collaborative design system is introduced, with defining all the agents of the architecture in detail. Agents communicate with each other using XML technology. Based on it, a prototype system using JavaEE environment is developed. Customers and designers can access the system by internet, customers input product parameters, designers design the roll, and simulation program simulate the design parameters to decide whether the parameters is reasonable and send feedback message to designers. All data are stored in database to carry out data mining and to provide intelligent support. A case study is given at the end of this paper to validate the course of using this multi-agent system

Development of complicated products is a project of system engineeringIt involves extensive and complicated knowledge,design meth ods and auxiliary technologyVarious factors affect each otherSo,modern produ ct development is a typical group problem with distributed and dynamic features It is apparent superiority to solve this problem with a multiagent system re presenting various knowledge domainsDistributed artificial intelligence knowle dge being used,the multiagent collaborative design system concept and model ba sed on Internet environment are put forwardThe realizing method of product developing agents,interactive process among multiagents,and organiz ation and implementing of the design project of the multiagent collaborative d esign system are discussed in detailApplication examples are also presented