Abstract
The engineering process including design, analysis/evaluation and manufacturing activities is becoming one of the key issues to embody a concurrent engineering concept. This paper proposes a framework to integrated the complicated engineering design and manufacturing processes under the concurrent engineering environment. The framework offers the following facilities: (1) to represent the complicated engineering process (2) to coordinate design activities and execute the process in a distributed environment (3) to support a communication among the related engineers. The engineering processes is depicted using process flow graphs that consist in tasks and the corresponding input and output data. The engineering activities in the defined processes can be executed in a distributed environment through process controller of the framework. Engineers can communicate to suggest their opinions and to exchange product information in the framework. We have conformed the CORBA standard to integrate various distributed engineering the and communicate among them, and used a Java to support the platform independent environment on the Internet. Since the proposed framework an be a formal approach to integrate the engineering processes by providing formalism, parallelism, reusability, and flexibility, it can be effectively applied to embody the concurrent engineering concept in a distributed environment.