A layered and modular platform to enable distributed CAx collaboration and support product data integration based on STEP standard

Exploitation of distributed resources spread in diverse enterprises is a new and critical issue in the course of product development cycles. Although the development of IT technology has provided a base for realisation of this paradigm and assisted different CAx agents, such as designers and engineers, to exchange their ideas and design information, but still many CAx software agents are working separately and locally in manufacturing environments and most of the current CAx software suites have been known to be inconvenient for enabling collaboration among manufacturing agents in distributed manufacturing enterprises. The distributed CAx collaboration and data integrity play a major role in the success of enterprises in today's social and economic environment. The existence of a product information model for a collaborative design and manufacture is an essential requirement for CAx modules and resources that are geographically distributed. Therefore, it is essential to use a platform that exchanges the product data between different distributed CAx software packages. Also, it should integrate product information resulting from distributed CAx product development processes. To integrate product data through manufacturing processes, different solutions have been proposed, among which one of the successful solutions was to use ISO 10303 standard. In this article, the essential requirements of a distributed, collaborative and integrated CAx manufacturing system will be declared. These requirements have the ability to support distributed CAx agents, to enable the collaboration among CAx software packages and to integrate the product data. Also, the dominant research is reviewed, and a new platform named Distributed-LAYMOD is proposed. The modular and layered structure of the Distributed-LAYMOD inherits the previous research of the authors and uses the XML structures to facilitate product data exchange. The different aspects of this platform to fulfil the requirements of distributed collaboration are discussed. Finally, a brief case study to demonstrate the capabilities of the Distributed-LAYMOD is considered.

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