A component agent based open CAD system for collaborative design

✍ Scribed by Mike Rosenman; Fujun Wang

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 344 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0926-5805
• DOI: 10.1016/s0926-5805(00)00106-0

✦ Synopsis

The competitive market requires rapid product development. Virtual product development is a new development mode in this network times. It is featured by its dynamic development alliance, i.e., those partners are distributed in the world. This paper presents an open-system architecture for a collaborative CAD system supporting virtual product development. The software component technology is adopted to build the system. A component is a reusable application whose data and methods are exposed, and can be accessed and operated by other applications. In this system, each building element or Ž . assembly is designed as an independent component. The component agent CA method is used as the basic system modules. To manage these distributed CAs, a web-based interface manager is provided. The assembly shop is a product design space based on those CAs and the interface manager. To manage the collaborative session, a web-based design session manager is proposed. This paper describes such a system architecture.