Research On Service-Oriented Collaborative Design For Mold & Die

Facing the keen market competition environment, most of the mold companies are seeking more advanced mode of design, so as to achieve greater competitive advantage. As a means of advanced design method, collaborative design can significantly improve the efficiency of product development and reduce product cost, so it is becoming the focus of attention in mold industry. Based on the characteristics of mold design, this paper has carried out the research on the basic theory, key technology and implementation of collaborative mold design.After analyzing the features of mold design, its process model is presented, and the functional requirements of collaborative mold design are extracted according to this. Because that the networked collaborative mold design is a complicated process, the decomposition of design targets and product component, as well as the selection strategy of designers are two key issues of the collaborative design process, which are studied in detail. Take the functional requirements of collaborative mold design as the foundation, the function framework of collaborative mold design is established.Aiming at the reality of the information system application in mold companies, the integration solution of application systems which is fit for collaborative design for mold industry is proposed. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) ideology is adopted to implement the system integration, and in these systems, the application logic is wrapped into web service, which is managed by the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In the course of systems integration, adapter method, Web services method and event-driven method are introduced for each kind of system application.For the complexity of mold design process, hierarchical model, which divides the design process into project layer and task layer, is brought into the process management. The project layer belongs to the project management category and the activity layer belongs to the workflow management category. In workflow management module, a graphical interface for workflow modeling is developed and the key functions of workflow engine are accomplished on the basis of re-development on an open-source workflow product. By means of database integration, the project management and workflow management are organically combined together.Group awareness is the critical issue in course of collaborative design, and it can be divided into three levels to analyse, including the application level of geometric data model, the operation level of geometric data model and the level of collaborative design environment. For the application level of geometric model, the adapter technology and event-driven method are utilized to integrate the commonly used design application systems of mold companies so as to make them work together smoothly. For the operation level of geometric model, the mechanism of activity tree makes the design task structure correspond to mold functional structure, which can effectively avoid the occurrence of design conflict and ensure good collaborative awareness; the multi-cast method of operation set is provided to transmit the design data incrementally, which greatly reduces the amount of transmission data and then improves the real-time performance of collaborative awareness. For the level of collaborative design environment, the use of NetMeeting as an awareness tool can further enhance the awareness quality.On the basis of investigating the mold design knowledge and extracting the common features of it, the knowledge cell model is introduced which can describe the knowledge in a unified way by XML, after that how to acquire the knowledge and how to validate the knowledge are also discussed. Aiming at the various types of knowledge, the methods of application of them are explored in detail.Finally, summing up the above research results, a prototype collaborative mold design system is achieved.