Internet based design system for globally distributed concurrent engineering

Companies can now make use of the Internet to communicate or do business. In the manufacturing industry, especially at the early phase of product development, this technology has become essential for enabling designers, process planning engineers, and production personnel to work on a consistent set of product information that is primarily CAD models. This article presents a three-tier client/server structure on which a tool is built to visualize CAD-neutral formats. This tool allows users to gather CAD models from local disks, WWW servers, and others on the company's Intranet, and then assemble and display them on the local screen. Through this facility, users can modify and save a CAD model into a database so that all project participants can work on the same set of information. The tool is platform independent with superior local 3D manipulation capabilities and supports DXF, OBJ, and VRML formats.