Collaborative Assembly Planning System under Web Environment

Distributed product development requires collaborative work among the team members. In order to support the assembly planning activities involving geographically dispersed designers, a Web-enabled supporting environment is proposed. The functional modules including client user interface, communication management, application services and information management are addressed in detail. By incorporating visual models at client side with assembly application models at server side, a prototypal system has been developed using VRML and Java-EAI techniques. Demonstration of a driver assembly is given to explain the synchronously collaborative assembly planning procedure. The feasibility of collaborative assembly planning and effectiveness of the system are validated