A Service Oriented Architecture for CAX concurrent collaboration

The competitive and open market nature demands different vendors to collaborate during the product life cycle and to reduce the productpsilas time to market. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to enable the concurrent collaboration of heterogeneous CAX tools at the feature level using a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach. A feature markup language (FML) is proposed as the modeling language for feature representation and exchange which can be independent to operating system and programming language. How to employ the concept of software factory to leverage FML as a domain specific language (DSL) is discussed for the process of feature development and distribution. Moreover, the underlying architecture is described to enable CAX information sharing in real-time preserving the semantics and consistency of CAX models.