The purpose of Computer Aided Design is to design good products as quickly as possible. To do this, it is important to reuse the old designs and build on them. Most engineering designers, therefore. hale studied methods for reusing old designs, and the results of their study hale been applied to new designs Unfortunately, this only involves reuse of geometric data without design knowledge. If they can design products with the geometric data, including design knowledge, of the old designed and share them through the Internet, design efficiency will be improved. In other words, one way to improve designer's productivity is to share design information that includes knowledge and scattered data across design offices. This paper introduces a shared design environment with distributed knowledge-base. A product design environment based on distributed knowledge-base is proposed, which integrates the CORBA, OLE and WWW as the network architecture, a 3D CAD system, and an expert system shell. A design example of the lens barrel of a projection television is implemented to verify the idea.

Network and Internet technology opens up another domain for building future CAD/CAM environment. The environment will be global, network-centric, and spatially distributed. In this paper, we present an approach for network-centric feature-based modeling in a distributed design environment. The presented approach combines the current feature-based modeling technique with distributed computing and communication technology for supporting product modeling and collaborative design activities over the network. The approach is implemented in a client/server architecture, in which Web-enabled feature modeling clients, neutral feature model server, and other applications communicate with one another via a standard communication protocol. The paper discusses how the neutral feature model supports multiple views and maintains naming consistency between geometric entities of the server and clients. Moreover, it explains how to minimize the network delay between the server and client according to incremental feature modeling operations.

In this paper, we present a Web-enabled product data sharing system for the support of RPD (Rapid Product Development) process by incorporating STEP (STandard for the Exchange of Product model data) with Web technology such as VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language), SGML (Structured Generalized Markup Language) and Java. Extreme competition makes product life cycle short by incessantly deprecating current products with a brand-new one, and thus urges enterprises to devise a new product faster than ever. In this environment, an RPD process with effective product data sharing system is essential to outstrip competitors by speeding up the development process. However, the diversity of product data schema and heterogeneous systems make it difficult to exchange the product data. We chose STEP as a neutral product data schema and Web as an independent exchange environment to overcome these problems. While implementing our system, we focused on the support of STEP AP 203 UoF (Units of Functionality) views to efficiently employ STEP data models that are maximally normalized, and therefore very cumbersome to handle. Our functionality-oriented UoF view approach can increase users'appreciation since it facilitates the modular usage of STEP data models. This can also enhance the accuracy of product data. We demonstrate that our view approach is applicable to the configuration control of mechanical assemblies.

A monitoring and control system, as a broker to connect work-fields with higher departs, gives a great effect on capacity and reliability of a manufacturing system. However, it is very difficult to construct an integrated monitoring control system in a shop with diverse equipment. This paper proposes a CORBA based scheme to construct an integrated system for monitoring and control of equipment in a machining shop. The system is developed by applying the object oriented technology. Thus, its design and maintenance are not only early but it can cope with variation of production situation flexibly. Finally, we introduce a prototype using a milling machine, a robot, PLC's, etc.

This paper presents a solid modeling system that enables real time co-operative modeling and discussion on m between geographically separated designers. The modeling system is implemented using CORBA architecture and integrated in WWW with Java technology. The server objects use a commercial solid modeling kernel to provide modeling features and access database including product model data. The client is implemented using Java2 platform so that enables end-users access the system with web-browsers.

XML and CORBA have vast potential to improve software interoperability and to facilitate data exchange across applications and people from various disciplines and vendors. This Paper describes a framework for the integration and validity evaluation of injection mold design problems in a network-oriented design environment, based on In and CORBA. An overview of the framework is provided and an application to a design phase of injection mold is illustrated. The example illustrates how design validities are notified and design directions are provided to the designer during design process.

The design and development of a Web-based Workflow Management System (WfMS) is described in this paper. WfMSs are employed by many organizations to manage their business processes efficiently. The goal of this research is to provide an effective management of design processes in a distributed and heterogeneous environment-an environment in which workflow participants are geographically dispersed and use different computing platforms. We identify the requirements of WfMSs for the distributed and heterogeneous environment. We present an approach to applying the Web technology to was. The developed system is composed of three main modules: Worflow Engine, Web-based clients, and Process Designer. The workflow engine is implemented in pure Java for portability to heterogeneous platforms. furthermore, the client interfaces are all programmed using applets, and thus they can be readily accessed through the Internet/intranet. The Process Designer provides a build-time function of generating process specifications. Some important functions of the developed system are explained in this paper. A prototype system has been developed and applied to design processes. The system allows effective cooperation among designers who may be geographically separated.

The growths of the World Wide Web and the advances in high-speed network access have greatly changed existing CAD/CAE environment. The m has enabled us to share various distributed product data and to collaborate on a design work. An international standard for the product model data, STEP, and a standard fur the distributed object technology, CORBA, are becoming very important components in the advanced design and manufacturing environment. These two technologies provide background for the sharing of product data and the integration of applications on the network. This study describes a prototype CAD/CAE environment that is integrated on the network by STEP and CORBA. Several application servers servers and client software were developed to verify the proposed concept.

This paper presents an integrated but open product development environment for distributed and collaborative design. The web-based framework, called DOME, allows designers to build integrated models using both local and distributed resources, and to collaborate by exchanging services in a network-centric product development environment. Thus, an integrated model can be created while each participant focuses on his or her own area of expertise. A design problem model is created by connecting modules, which represent specific system components, analysis capabilities/software, disciplines, or organizations relevant to the problem. The modules interact with each other using service exchanges based upon the CORBA standard communication protocol. The goal of this framework is tall provide the ability to rapidly construct integrated design problem models to facilitate collaborative design work, improve product quality and reduce development time. Ultimately, it should allow specialized engineering applications and design problem models to operate under a common design environment.

This paper presents new type remote home automation that can control and manage hi-directionally and efficiently home appliances and home security systems in home through Internet. The system is used virtual reality technology to construct very easy user interface and used Internet as network for remote control. Here, the user interface is 3D GUI which gives user feeling to be at his home on web-browser, and also shows him present state of control objects at home. This system has been implemented on the basis of Java and VRML. In this paper we propose the internet-based remote control system, and show usefulness of the suggested system by applying to home automation system.

For last two decades numerous automatic mesh generation algorithms for various two dimensional objects have been introduced continuously and among them triangular mesh generation schemes have been majority because of efficiency and controllability. In our study, an existing triangular mesh generation algorithm developed by Lo is totally modified to more improve node distribution, element shape, and objects shape independency. ft is composed of node generation part and element generation part. In order to find a suitable node position within geometry, the suggested algorithm searches desirable positions of points within boundary and optimizes node position to generate comparatively well-shaped elements. More over, the suggested algorithm handles various complex two dimensional objects and its meshing speed shows superiority to those of the existing triangulation mesh generation algorithms. It is fully automated in a sense of constructing object boundary and hence can be directly used as an independent meshing software.