Strategies for the Collaborative Use of CAD Product Models
Year: 2009
Editor: Norell Bergendahl, M.; Grimheden, M.; Leifer, L.; Skogstad, P.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Ding, Lian; Ball, Alexander; Patel, Manjula; Matthews, Jason; Mullineux, Glen
Series: ICED
Section: Design Information and Knowledge
Page(s): 123-134
Abstract
Today, more and more companies are shifting from design and manufacturing to provide through-life support. Product models, as one of the most important types of product information, must be communicated, shared, and retrieved between distributed design teams and various users or partners at different stages of a product lifecycle. However, the conventional CAD models cannot satisfy these demands due to the ephemeral nature of the CAD systems and issues of proprietary formats, the protection of intellectual property, and the recording of domain-specific information. To overcome some limitations of CAD models, lightweight representations have been developed during the last decade to support collaborative product development. This paper aims to address the issue of long-lived product models using a combination of CAD models and lightweight representations. A new strategy, which integrates the techniques of the annotation of product models and the registration and storage of representation information, is proposed to support product models and other related information to be shared and reused over the long-term product life.
Keywords: product model, CAD, Lightweight representation, representation information repository