Collaborative modeling in networked manufacturing

Collaborative modeling and design is an important part in networked manufacturing. The collaborative development process of a complex product should consider synthetically manufacturing and assembly process, and may be involved with many disciplines, such as mechanics, dynamics, vibration analysis, and so on. In this paper, the constraints network approach is presented to model collaborative development process. Firstly, we describe ontology for constraints network modeling in collaborative design. The ontology is being used as a communication language between cooperating engineering design team. Secondly, the constraints network is used to model "time dimension" concurrence and "space dimension" collaboration in the development process. In this model, interval consistency algorithm is adopted to predict the potential conflicts and specify the interval of design parameters. Finally, constraints network-based design method is studied, and optimization approach is presented.