Intelligent Management of Dies and Molds CAD Projects

The current paper presents a methodology of archiving dies and molds CAD projects to quickly and easily find relevant parts from them based on clearly defined criteria. In a die and mold design workshop, existing projects from the archive are a very important source of ideas for ongoing or future projects, given the possibility to quickly access them. The proposed methodology is implemented in a distributed application. In principle the archiving process consists in filling a form with the project parameters. When engineers are searching for an archived project they inform the system about the characteristics they are looking for and the application returns the relevant projects and their location. The application is written in VB.NET and follows an object oriented approach. Being designed to connect to a database located on the network, it can be used by more companies in common or by the same company subsidiaries found in different locations.