An Information Model for Finding and Integrating Distributed Resources for Engineering Design-Manufacturing Processes

ABSTRACT The complexity of many modern products means that multiple design teams need to collaborate during product development projects. Driven by such issues, companies are increasingly staffing only their core competencies in-house and depending on other firms to provide the complementary design knowledge and design effort needed for a complete product. With the advent of the Internet, it is today possible that these external resources are physically, geographically, and temporally distributed. In this scenario, finding the right external resource for a given task and establishing effective communication between such resources are two of the most crucial elements of the product realization process. Through this paper, the authors aim to develop an information model and middleware that enable identification and use of suitable resources for design and design-for-manufacture stages in a distributed design and manufacturing environment. Such an information model and middleware will enable a designer to use XML to effectively communicate information regarding requirements, engineering parameters, process details and resource capabilities to different entities in the product realization process. The information model and middleware developed are implemented as part of Web-DPR -web-based distributed product realization environment developed at the Systems Realization Laboratory at Georgia Tech. KEYWORDS distributed design and manufacturing, XML, information model, middleware