A system framework of model quality analysis for product model in collaborative manufacturing

Collaborative manufacturing is increasingly being adopted to respond to increasing market competition by making the best use of advantageous resources. As collaborative manufacturing team members tend to change with the project goals, it is difficult for designers to know accurately each time the quality demand for product CAD model from different model users, which causes model quality defects. Hence, it is necessary to check the CAD model quality timely in collaborative manufacturing. Existing model quality analysis approaches mainly aim at the conventional manufacturing, which has relatively fixed participants. These approaches are difficult to perform different model quality checks according to different model users’ demand in the context of collaborative manufacturing. To solve the problem, a framework of model quality analysis system for collaborative manufacturing is proposed in this paper. By establishing the mechanism of knowledge sharing among team members, this system can cope with different demands of product model quality analysis flexibly. And adopting ontology-based knowledge representation and reasoning, the system can perform automatically model quality check using the shared knowledge. The function, architecture, and business process of the system are presented. To improve knowledge representation and sharing, an information model of model quality inference knowledge is designed. Furthermore, the acquisition and reasoning of model quality knowledge are discussed. Finally, a prototype system is developed and two case studies are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and openness of proposed framework.