Collaborative engineering and product quality assurance based on integrated engineering information management

Engineering collaboration is inevitable in the various engineering phases including product design phase, analysis phase, inspection phase, and so on. However, sharing engineering data generated from CAD/CAE/CAI systems is technically very difficult due to the complexity and size of the data. Besides, heterogeneous CAD/CAE/CAI systems make it difficult to accomplish data sharing for engineering collaboration purpose. We propose a new integrated engineering data representation scheme and developed visualization and real-time conference system for remote engineering collaboration and sharing information between companies. The system's capability includes data translation, visualization and conference using engineering information generated from the various commercial engineering systems. It supports integrated history management for product design information along with other engineering information such as analysis data, inspection data, and manufacturing data. The developed system is used as a basis of the infrastructure for the collaborative product lifecycle management.