Platform for collaborative product and processes development.

Draghici, George ; Savii, George ; Draghici, Anca 等

Abstract: New and efficient paradigms for web-based collaborative product design in a global economy will be driven by increased outsourcing, increased competition, and pressures to reduce product development time. The paper presents the prototype of the collaborative platform for integrated product and processes development in association with product life-cycle stages. The platform implementation is related to a Romanian virtual research network INPRO in the context of the joint research activities. Based on the existing web and video-conferencing facilities, in association with a product life-cycle stages tree representation, we have defined the platform architecture using the IDEFO language. A key contribution of this work is a flexible architecture that joint together: activities, processes, methods, tools, case studies and researchers' competencies, in a modular feature, easy to develop and manage.

Key words: Collaborative Product Design, Product Life-Cycle, IDEFO, Web-site, Video-conference

1. INTRODUCTION

There have been tremendous changes in product development processes in recent years. A significant increase in the outsourcing of components necessitates increased coordination and collaboration within and across enterprises. Balakrishnan et al. (1999) define collaboration as the process of interaction among multiple participants with inter-linked but distinct roles and specializations working together on interrelated activities towards a common goal.

Collaborative product design based information systems are slowly becoming a reality due to the advent of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) development. However, collaboration for product design requires considerably broader capabilities than are provided by most of the other simple collaborative applications available today. The current systems demand high bandwidth, high-end software and hardware resources at the client-side. Consequently, true Internet-based collaborative product design systems are not yet available.

Our research prototype provides a platform to support collaborative product and processes design based on the product life-cycle stages in the Romanian virtual research network INPRO. Internet and the video-conference system are the main facilities that contribute to the platform development and use. The goal of this prototype is to develop the framework of collaborative design system that will join and share the knowledge and facilities (methods and tools for design, communication, and training/negotiation equipment) for product development.

The platform employs a three-tier architecture that partitions the overall system into a server-side, a client-side, and a database. A master copy of the product development model is kept at the server and each client has a local copy of this master. The clients are capable of creating, modifying, and deleting the master product model using the collaboration platform.

All of the product modeling and constraint solving operations are performed at the server-side in order to have thin clients. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the ability of our thin-client architecture to collaborate. Ability to perform the following functions, which are not done by any research prototype or commercial system, demonstrates the uniqueness of the architecture: (1) Creating and modify a product design in a collaborative mode; (2) Having a thin-client model by performing the computation intensive operations based on the product life-cycle stages and, also using the video-conferencing system. (3) Maintaining the product development history in the database on the server-side. This information could be retrieved for reviewing when needed.

2. REVIEW OF PREVIOUS WORK

The most collaborative platforms support data exchange, collaborative viewing and mark-up, and share 2D and 3D product models.

CollIDE (Nam and Wright, 1998) and CyberEye (Zhuang, Chen and Venter, 2000) are 3D shared workspaces that can be accessed by multiple users, but they lack the capability to perform collaborative creation, deletion, or the manipulation of geometry. Kao and Lin (1998) proposed a collaborative CAD/CAM system (COCADCAM) that includes surface modeling, tool path simulation and post-processing, and CAD geometry co-editing, but no solid modeling. Collaborative Solid Modeling (Chan, Wong and Ng, 1999) allows sharing and editing of a solid model over the web synchronously, but requires a solid modeler at each client. WebSPIFF (Bidarra et. al., 2001) is a collaborative feature based modeler that allows simultaneous creation, deletion, and modification of features by many users.

Teledesign (Shu and Flowers, 1992) examines groupware interface issues with collaborative 3D modeling environments. MUG (Foster et. al., 2001) is a multi-user environment for collaborative conceptual shape design capable of modeling NURBS one at a time. NetVP (Lee, 2001) is a distributed design environment for network-centric virtual prototyping. NetVP is capable of geometry creation using features but not using sketching. Important contribution to a Computer Aided Distributed Design and Collaboration are described by Agrawal et. al. (2002). They have developed and implement a collaborative shape design system with a server-based geometry Kernel. Also, the same authors make a relevant overview upon the commercial systems also available. Webscope[TM], OneSpace Designer[TM], DIVISION[TM], Alibre Design[TM], Alventive[TM], GS-Design[TM], IX SpeeD[TM] and 3G.Web.Decisions[TM].

Important conclusions were formulated: most of the collaborative platforms are dedicated for product shape conceptualization (most 3D models) and modeling; they support web synchronously collaboration for CAD/CAM (for the fields design and manufacturing); most of them support all type documents' share but they do not have special application for training or negotiation (design argumentation).

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3. DESCRIPTION OF THE PLATFORM PROTOTYPE

The main common research activity in the INPRO network is to develop a common knowledge base to support collaborative work. The methods and tools that will be used focused on the inventory of the actual resources of the partners and a database creation, which will be available to all partners on INPRO's web page. The basic conceptualization of the knowledge-based system or knowledge-level agent in the case of the collaborative platform is related to the following product life-cycle stages: (1) require analysis; (2) design; (3) manufacturing; (4) end-of-life (recycling). These categories are detailed described using the IDEFO language and the iGrafx software facilities (process and detail diagrams). These diagrams are related to specific knowledge-bases with: methods, tools, procedures and researchers competencies (the ontology). This basic structure is displayed on INPRO's web page, but the access is allowed for the members only for the development of the future collaboration with industrial partners.

Figure 1 shows the architecture of the proposed collaborative platform. It is build around a central server, hosting the database system and the file system (documents) (Savii, 2002).

The INPRO network decided very early to lean the joint work of the members and a part of the work dissemination on a video-conference (VC) system. This will allowed the easy relation with all the partners and the link with other global virtual teams. The VC system consists of four remote VC of the INPRO network sites across the country, established in each research pole. A collaborative usage of the system for: training and common research activities; collaborative work (working group, application sharing, PhD. Thesis presentations etc.); management of the network; INPRO network activity archiving and streaming; work jointly with industrialist and other virtual global team. The meaning that the system must support: IP or ISDN communication; an international service; interactive multi-sessions for the partners; high quality and service.

4. RESULTS

The first result of our research is the basic representation of the collaborative platform and its disposal on Internet. After discussions between the researchers, this primary form of the platform will be optimized and then will be filled and defined the knowledge data-bases.

5. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, a collaborative platform for product and processes development is presented. The web based collaborative platform is linked with a VC system for training and design decision support. In our platform concept, the whole product life-cycle stages are considered and sustained by specific knowledge bases. It is expected that the research results and the well definition of the collaborative platform will play a crucial role in expanding distributed the work related to integrated product and processes development for the whole product life-cycle (Draghici, 2007)

6. REFERENCES

Balakrishnan, A., Kumara, S. R. T. & Sundaresan, S. (1999). Manufacturing in the Digital Age: Exploiting Information Technologies for Product Realization, Information Systems Frontiers, 1, 25-50.

Nam, T. J. & Wright, D. K. (1998). CollIDE: A Shared 3D Workspace for CAD, 1998 Conference on Network Entities, Leeds, UK.

Zhuang, Y., Chen, L. & Venter, R. (2000) CyberEye: An Internet-Enabled Environment to Support Collaborative Design, Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, 8(3), pp. 213-229.

Kao, Y. C. & Lin, G. C. I. (1998) Development of a Collaborative CAD/CAM System, Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 14, pp. 55-68.

Chan, S., Wong, M. & Ng, V. (1999) Collaborative Solid Modeling on the W, Proceeding. of the 14th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, San Antonio, Texas, pp. 598-602.

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Draghici, G. & Draghici A. (2007) Romanian Research Network for Integrated Product and Process Engineering, in Krause, F.L. (ed.), The Future of Product Development, Proceeding of the 17th CIRP Design Conference 2007, Springer, Berlin, Germany, pp. 341-350.