Internet-based collaboration system: Press-die design process for automobile manufacturer

To survive in a severe competitive environment, manufacturing enterprises must accomplish objectives such as cost reduction, quality improvement and short tine-to-market, Also, as the manufacturing environment becomes more globalised and distributed, it is important to manage the workflow harmoniously v and to share the information efficiently among geographically dispersed users In this research, we propose a collaborative design and engineering system, which manages various design processes in an integrated manner and enables the sharing of design information. Because design information is usually very large in its size, it is very difficult to synchronise the individual design data of each designer with the entire design data. As a solution for efficient data sharing among the designers in networks, CORBA can be applied to synchronise the states of the design information. If one user modifies design data on his/her computer, this operation is detected and transmitted to other users who are related with the design modification. A receiver's computer automatically synchronises its data with the sender's message. In this paper, an Internet-based collaboration system for a press-die design process for automobile manufacturers is developed with CORBA, Java, Java3D and a relational database system. After modelling a practical press-die design process with the UML language, workflow routing paths are created by the modelling data. Cost and time for design can be estimated by the concurrent quasi-procedural method. The system developed can notify design modification to users when it is required, and enables users to share design models and analysis results. Designers can exchange opinions about common design matters by the conferencing function of the system.