A WWW-based information management system for rapid and integrated mould product development

As efficient management of product information that covers the whole life cycle is critical to the enhancement of corporate competitiveness. This paper explores the design and development of a World Wide Web (WWW) based product development information management system for a cross-nation manufacturing corporation that is headed by a holding company in Christchurch, New Zealand. Since product data are often managed in a distributed computing environment, common object request broker architecture (CORBA) is employed to ensure the interoperability among distributed information objects. A STEP-based information framework is proposed to preserve the openness of the system. This WWW-based information management system is discussed in this paper, which includes two major components: 1. WWW-based product design and development distributed object-oriented databases and knowledge bases. 2. A WWW-based integrated system platform. Several submodels are introduced, which include an object-oriented database structure, a WWW-based information management system, a WWW database tool, an information access tool, the incremental process-planning method, a cost-optimisation model and an integrated software platform for the integration of CAD, CAPP, CAM, and a WWW-based information management system.