Development of a feature-based and object-oriented concurrent engineering system

Product information modeling is critical to the integration of mechanical CAD/CAM systems and to the implementation of a concurrent engineering system. This paper presents a recent development of a feature-based and object-oriented concurrent engineering system with its focus on a product information modeling technique implemented in the system. The technique was developed to capture product definition data including form features and their spatial relationships and to store them as an object-oriented information model during the design process. The paper also describes the implementation of the information modeling technique and its application to manufacturing process planning in an object-oriented environment.