Collaborative Fixture Design and Analysis Using Service Oriented Architecture

Distributed collaborative design and manufacture enables manufacturing organizations to seamlessly collaborate with each other to design and manufacture products with shorter lead time. This requires the distributed system not only to maintain data consistency across globally distributed locations seamlessly, but also allows team members to access the services securely and transparently. In addition, appropriate information models need to be developed to facilitate design data exchange between different domains. This paper reports on the development of a distributed collaborative system by addressing the above issues and demonstrating the developed system using fixture design and analysis as a case study. Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are employed in this system to address the issues of interoperability, platform-independence, and language neutrality. Information exchange models based on XML schema have been used to facilitate data transfer between design and analysis.