A Manufacturing Information Infrastructure to Link Team Based Design to Global Manufacture

The moves towards team based design and global manufacture have led to the need for substantial improvements in the information support systems to aid the decision making of product designers and manufacturing engineers. This paper describes the findings of a research programme which has investigated the manufacturing information infrastructures required in both product and manufacturing models. A data model to represent global manufacturing facilities is proposed. Further a product data framework has been defined which can support multiple manufacturing views of a product. The machining and assembly processes have been used to illustrate these