A Webbased agile system for rolling bearing design

Rolling bearings are basic mechanical elements for supporting rotational and reciprocating motion in engineering products. Many approaches have been proposed by researchers in order to facilitate the procedure of bearing design, but mainly concentrating on the development of PCbased systems or relative software packages.The authors present a novel approach to implementing a design support system for rolling bearings based on the World Wide Web so as to achieve agility in rolling bearing design. The system was developed based on the philosophy of agile manufacturing by integrating various information resources, artificial intelligence, and Web technology with expertise. This Webbased distributed system will be globally accessible by the user on the Internet and can be automatically sized according to the demand of application requirements. The system implementation issues are discussed in detail in this paper.