Integration, Management and Communication of Heterogeneous Design Resources with WWW Technologies

Recently, advanced information technologies have opened new possibilities for collaborative designs. In this paper, a Web-based collaborative design environment is proposed, where heterogeneous design applications can be integrated with a common interface, managed dynamically for publishing and searching, and communicated with each other for integrated multi-objective design. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is employed as an implementation tool to enable integration and communication of design application programs; and the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is used as a common data descriptive language for data exchange between heterogeneous applications and for resource description and recording. This paper also introduces the implementation of the system and the encapsulating issues of existing legacy applications. At last, an example of gear design based on the system is illustrated to identify the methods and procedures developed by this research.