Design resource management for virtual prototyping in product collaborative design

Designers often have some difficulties in fulfilling complex product design due to the lack of design resources. It is a crucial issue that how to help designers to produce design from enormous, isomeric, and even distributed design resources of virtual prototyping and then ally those correlative distributed design resources to collaborative design. This article is devoted to an object-oriented design resource management for virtual prototyping in collaborative design. After the design resource unit model is proposed with the representation model of virtual prototyping, the object-oriented product design resource representation framework for virtual prototyping is then put forward. The storage, usage, search, version management, and security management strategies for design resources of virtual prototyping are then discussed in detail. The framework of design resource management system for virtual prototyping is also put forward to support collaborative design. The collaborative design of cold heading machine is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is helpful to distributed knowledge reuse for collaborative design.