A Distributed Environment for Collaborative Design

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Chen ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Mechanical Design ◽  
Design System ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Distributed Environment ◽  
Engineering Project ◽  
Collaborative Environment ◽  
Schedule Design ◽  
Aircraft Component ◽  
Design Systems

Tools and applications are needed to provide engineers with support to design in a distributed and collaborative environment. These systems and tools need to make it possible to share design information, and schedule design process so that a group of distributed engineers can work together. Software level design is the prerequisite condition for applying any design approaches into the distributed mechanical design and in this paper, basic design systems and design tools are developed so that a typical distributed mechanical design can be supported. Requirements for a collaborative design system are presented, along with requirements to develop a prototype distributed system. The system is demonstrated on reverse engineering project for an aircraft component.

A Cooperative-Collaborative Design System for Multi-Disciplinary Mechanical Design

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Chen ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Mechanical Design ◽  
System Level ◽  
Design System ◽  
Design Collaboration ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
Design Process Model

The emergence of computer and network technology has provided opportunities for researchers to construct and build systems to support dynamic, real-time, and collaborative engineering design in a concurrent manner. This paper provides an understanding of the product design in a distributed environment where designers are in different geographic locations and are required to be involved in the design process to ensure successful product design. A design process model that captures the major interactions among stakeholders is presented, based on the observation of cooperation and collaboration. The stakeholders’ interactions are divided into activity and system level to distinguish the interactions in group design activities and design perspective evolution. An initial computer implementation of the design model is presented. The design system consists of a set of tools associated with design and a management system to facilitate distributed designers to support various design activities, especially conceptual design. Our research emphasis of design collaboration in this paper is: (i) Model a Cooperative-collaborative design process; (ii) Support synchronized design activities; and (iii) Structure the complex relations of various design perspectives from engineering disciplines.

Research on Late Join in Collaborative Pattern Design

2010 ◽  
Vol 108-111 ◽  
pp. 1492-1496
Author(s):  
Guo Zheng Wang ◽  
Bo Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Single Server ◽  
Distributed Environment ◽  
Pattern Design ◽  
Performance Requirements ◽  
Multiple Servers ◽  
Ubiquitous Environment ◽  
Design Systems

This paper presents the introduction of late join problem in collaborative pattern design systems under the ubiquitous environment, describes the performance requirements that the algorithm should meet, and proposes an efficient multiple servers algorithm which can prevent the problem brought by single server algorithm. By using this algorithm, the problem of late join brought in collaborative design in the distributed environment is well solved.

Mechanical-Design-Oriented Knowledge-Driven Model

2010 ◽  
Vol 44-47 ◽  
pp. 1987-1990
Author(s):  
De Fang Liu ◽  
Bin Wang ◽  
Hong Pan Wu
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
Mechanical Design ◽  
System Structure ◽  
Design System ◽  
Normal Product ◽  
Knowledge Reasoning ◽  
Product Design Process

According to the characters of mechanical product design, product design knowledge is classified into explicit knowledge and indefinite knowledge. A knowledge-driven product design system model was proposed based on the knowledge management. To meet the normal product design process, the design system structure was built on four layers. A mixed knowledge reasoning strategy was proposed, which is combined by design cases, models, and rules. The system provides a public integration interface, so different design tools such as UG NX, Catia and Pro-E can be applied. To resolve the design conflict in product design process, a collaborative design technique was put forward that the CAD, CAPP, CAM engineers worked togeth

Organization of Collaborative Decision Making to Form Design Processes

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Chen ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Design System ◽  
Design Quality ◽  
Improve Design ◽  
Design Collaboration ◽  
Collaborative Environment ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
Form Design

Design and development of a product requires considering different aspects of the product through coordination, negotiation, and discussion in a collaborative environment. Each participant plays a role as a stakeholder, generating information from his/her viewpoints or perspectives, which influence the design through his/her design decisions. Collaboration is essential in a design process to avoid decision making mistakes, to shorten design time, and to improve design quality. Specific focuses on design collaboration in this paper are: (i) Modeling collaborative design process; and (ii) Implementing design system to support real-time and synchronized group design activities.

Elements and Techniques to Develop a Distributed Design Framework

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Chen ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Design ◽  
Distributed Design ◽  
Design Environment ◽  
Engineering Project ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Design Models ◽  
Client Server ◽  
Function Block ◽  
Design Systems ◽  
Design Customization

The direction of mechanical design is now experiencing the trends of resource globalization, design customization and demand for cheap computing. Successful integration and collaboration are very important for design systems. Currently many researches focus on client-server structure to keep the data consistent and neutral. This paper discusses the issues and techniques to build a framework to support integration and collaboration in a distributed design environment. Overview of the system architecture and modules of the framework are presented to explain the method for CAD software wrapping and management of design models. The concept of a function block module to integrate different analysis tools and a search engine to find the analysis path for design problems are also presented. A reverse engineering project is used as an example to describe how design process works in a distributed manner.

Enabling Local Risk Assessment to Support Global Collaboration in a Distributed Environment

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuming Qiu ◽  
Ping Ge ◽  
Solomon C. Yim
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Risk Information ◽  
Uniform Structure ◽  
Local Domain ◽  
Distributed Environment ◽  
Multiple Stakeholders ◽  
Collaborative Environment ◽  
Global Negotiation ◽  
Local Risk

Risk is a crucial criterion for decision making among multiple stakeholders negotiating for an agreement in a distributed environment. The challenge here is that risk may have different meanings and implications to different stakeholders, and this creates considerable barriers to effective negotiation and coordination in collaborative design. Our goal is to 1) capture the heterogeneous risk information at intra- and inter- stakeholder levels, 2) represent them using a uniform structure based on a function-failure relationship, and 3) enable the negotiation of the risk information among the multiple stakeholders through this uniform structure. Though a significant number of existing methods for risk analysis and management have been developed, these methods mainly focus on the local domain of a certain single stakeholder, and few have considered the possible influence and variations related to global aspects that is important for negotiation among multiple, distributed stakeholders. This work develops intra-level risk property tables to capture and represent the various risk evaluations from individual members in a single stakeholder; and then inter-level risk property tables are formed based on the synthesis of the various intra-level risk properties into a group representation for the single stakeholder, which is directly used in global negotiation and coordination with other stakeholders. An adjustable approach is used in our work to enable the adjustability of the intra- and inter- level risk evaluations via negotiation. An example problem from a NSF/NEES-sponsored research collaborative network is used to demonstrate the use of this method. The preliminary results show that this method has potential in enabling local risk assessment to support global negotiation and coordination in a distributed, collaborative environment.

Lessons From Experimental Computer Assisted Sketching Tool for Planar Mechanisms

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Pardasani ◽  
J. Dickinson ◽  
Z. Li ◽  
Y. Zeng ◽  
H. Antunes
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Design ◽  
Design System ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Design Domain ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Tablet Pc ◽  
Planar Mechanisms ◽  
Research Issues ◽  
Research Challenges ◽  
Basic Approaches

This paper describes the authors’ experiences in implementing a prototype to explore the technical and research challenges in developing a mechanical design system based on the sketching metaphor. This includes basic approaches, methodology, framework, and research issues. Since the objective of the developing the prototype was to identify the issues, a simple, yet representative design domain of conceptual design of planar mechanisms was chosen. The prototype has the functionality to support users creating skeleton sketches of planar mechanisms on a tablet PC. The freehand sketches are then interpreted to derive the structure of the mechanism consisting of linkages and joints. The paper describes the approach for deriving components from skeleton diagrams and outlines the research challenges in way of creating design tools based on the sketching metaphor.

System Engineering Workshare Risk Analysis

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Leung ◽  
Kosuke Ishii ◽  
Jan Benson ◽  
Jeffrey Abell
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Design System ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Work Distribution ◽  
System Components ◽  
Design Systems ◽  
Entire World ◽  
Regional Centers ◽  
Customer Values

In today’s global economy, companies develop products not only to target a single market, but to sell them to the entire world. Companies that realize the importance of collaborative design develop regional engineering centers worldwide to balance design variations while ensuring local market success. This paradigm enables diverse customer values to be integrated into products, but also introduces challenges in the management of work distribution. Typically, workshare decisions consider the capability and capacity of the regional centers. This strategy, however, overlooks the interdependence of the design systems, leading to delays and quality problems. This paper describes a method to formulate the workshare risk based on the couplings of the design system components and to evaluate overall workshare scenario. The method involves two relationships, Component-to-Component Coupling and Workshare Coupling, and a technique to combine these two relationships to measure the workshare risk. A simple case of hair dryer illustrates the concepts, while the method is serving actual global automotive development projects.

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