SHARED: An information model for cooperative product development

One fundamental issue in developing collaborative engineering systems is the representation of product information which supports communication and coordination. This product information includes not only the geometric and physical properties of the product and its parts, but also information about functions, constraints and the design rationale. In this paper, we describe an information model, SHARED, which was developed for encoding product information in DICE, a distributed and integrated environment for computer-aided engineering. SHARED provides multiple levels of both functional and geometric abstractions, multiple views and techniques for maintaining consistency between the various abstractions and views. These elements are essential for a good representation model of product information. The use of the SHARED model is illustrated through an example, depicting the various representations of a product as it evolves through the design process. The SHARED model has been implemented over a distributed OODBMS as a toolkit/framework for developing environments which need to model, manipulate and communicate product information between distributed cooperating applications, while supporting coordination between them.