Research On The Supporting Platform For Collaborative Design Of Die & Mould

Die & mould is a kind of basic device for manufacturing industries. Its design and manufacturing time will seriously affect the new product development cycle. Therefore, the die & mould industries should be able to quickly response the market requirements, reduce the cycle time of design and manufacturing in the farthest extend, and guarantee the quality and reliability. In order to meet the requirements, the collaborative design methods and concepts were proposed by many researchers.In this thesis, based on the analysis of the functional requirements for the collaborative design of dies and moulds, the technology of supporting platform for collaborative design system is studied.Firstly, the collaborative design process, the architecture and the network supporting environment are introduced. Then according to the features of die & mould design, the special architecture of collaborative design system for die & mould is proposed. After analyzing the technology of COM interface, the communication module is established by using COM interfaces of NetMeeting to support the communication between designers of die & mould.Since the knowledge of designing die & mould plays an important role in the collaborative design environment, a XML-based knowledge representation scheme is proposed to realize the knowledge integration, inherit and sharing,meanwhile the knowledge base and its management are also provided.Based on the researches mentioned above, the supporting platform of the collaborative design system for dies & moulds upon NX platform have been developed. The application has demonstrated that the platform is available for the collaborative design of dies & moulds.