Strategies for the Collaborative Use of CAD Product Models

Today, more and more companies are shifting from design and manufacturing to provide through-life support. Product models, as one of the most important types of product information, must be communicated, shared, and retrieved between distributed design teams and various users or partners at different stages of a product lifecycle. However, the conventional CAD models cannot satisfy these demands due to the ephemeral nature of the CAD systems and issues of proprietary formats, the protection of intellectual property, and the recording of domain-specific information. To overcome some limitations of CAD models, lightweight representations have been developed during the last decade to support collaborative product development. This paper aims to address the issue of long-lived product models using a combination of CAD models and lightweight representations. A new strategy, which integrates the techniques of the annotation of product models and the registration and storage of representation information, is proposed to support product models and other related information to be shared and reused over the long-term product life. Three key issues in the proposed strategy have been addressed: storage of extra information by the ‘stand-off’ annotation of product models; sharing information among CAD models and their derived lightweight representations through the consistent identification of geometry; and keeping product data readable and reusable in the future by long-term preservation of representation information. An implementation has proved that the proposed strategy can be applied using current software techniques.