ELEMENTS AND TECHNIQUES TO DEVELOP A DISTRIBUTED DESIGN FRAMEWORK

摘要

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.