Collaborative Information System Architecture for CAD / CAM in New Product Development Based on STEP Standard

—In today's competitive market, information technology tools play a most important role in new product development. Integrated design includes CAD, process planning and CNC code generation. The commercialized CAD/CAM software solutions and industrial systems can be acquired readily. These solutions or systems, however, cannot connect together in a seamless way, that is, they cannot fit in integrated environment. Different CAD/CAM Application software need supports for data exchange in manufacturing enterprises. This article reviews the different architectures of integrated and collaborative information systems architectures. The reviewed architectures reveal that comprehensive interoperable CAD/CAM application software should be developed. Most of current architectures do not support integration of data; they can't connect different CAD/CAM application software seamlessly for data interchange based on STEP Standard (ISO 10303) and can't enable the CAD/CAM application software to collaborate together. Considering these lacks, this article proposes architecture for a comprehensive interoperable CAD/CAM interface; and discusses the different aspects of this architecture. The architecture consists of several layers. These layers support all CAD/CAM application software engaged in product development. The CAD/CAM application software exchange their required information collaboratively based on their own data structure. The architecture layers convert the application software' processed data to STEP based data model. They store the processed data in an integrated database; and vice versa, the layers retrieve the data to the CAD/CAM interface's data structure.

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