Three-dimensional online customization ordering system

With the increasingly intensive market competition and the demand for individualized products from customers, a new pattern for manufacturing, mass customization, is therefore emerging. We propose an architecture to construct a three-dimensional e-commerce Web site which supports mass customization. Online product information is represented as VRML models, which are based on related CAD data and come up through conversion process. With the enhanced interaction functions, customers can customize the products as they like and view the results in real time through a Web browser. The system takes 3 tier architecture and adopts RM1 to communicate between client and server. We have also developed supporting tools, which are incorporated with PDM system, to facilitate enterprises to publish their product catalogues. These tools define the customizable product information in XML documents and can automatically generate all the resources to construct such a 3D Web site based on predefined template. We have built a prototype of online order system for beach vehicle. The results make us believe that the proposed system has potential to be practical, which may need some improvement.