Product design through virtual collocation of product designers and design services

This paper reports the development of a collaborative product design environment using multidisciplinary analysis and design (MAD) technology and the information infrastructure of the Internet. The proposed product design environment provides a two level hierarchical setup for product development within the framework of a collaborative product design (CPD) system through the co-location of product designers (first level) and design services (second level). The prototype CPD system offers the following facilities for Web based Product Design: (i) an environment for the visual presentation, interactive refinement and specification of product specifications on VRML based sharable CAD models on the web, (ii) Web integrated product design data management system for supporting CPD tasks, and (iii) Web based design and manufacturability analysis. The prototype CPD system has been implemented using a variety of commercial packages such as I-DEAS, CastCHECK and programming languages such as JAVA, C, PERL and FORTRAN77 and also encompasses a collection of web servers on different computing platforms such as SUN, DEC-Alpha and Windows NT workstations.