DESIGN FRAMEWORKS FOR CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

As technological tasks in manufacturing environment have become progressively complicated, today's designers are confronted not only with increasing complexity of product designs but also with constantly increasing number and complexity of specialized design tools. The entire design process has consequently become very complicated. A large number of highly specialized design tools have to be developed to meet the technological needs of complex design tasks, and integrated into a computer-aided design (CAD) framework to provide better services to users. The concept of the framework may be of special interest to those who try to implement the philosophy of concurrent engineering, because a large number of design tools are required during the design phase to examine the entire aspects of a product's life-cycle in a coherent way. This paper identifies the needs and requirements of such CAD frameworks for concurrent engineering environment and discusses the object-oriented paradigm which has several salient features applicable to the development of control mechanisms for CAD tools within the framework.