Concurrent Design of Products, Manufacturing Processes and Systems

Book excerpt: Methods presented involve the use of simulation and modeling tools and virtual workstations in conjunction with a design environment. This allows a diverse group of researchers, manufacturers, and suppliers to work within a comprehensive network of shared knowledge. The design environment consists of engineering workstations and servers and a suite of simulation, quantitative, computational, analytical, qualitative and experimental tools. Such a design environment will allow the effective and efficient integration of complete product design, manufacturing process design, and customer satisfaction predictions. This volume enables the reader to create an integrated concurrent engineering design and analysis infrastructure through the use of virtual workstations and servers; provide remote, instant sharing of engineering data and resources for the development of a product, system, mechanism, part, business and/or process, and develop applications fully compatible with international CAD/CAM/CAE standards for product representation and modeling.