A Web-Based Product Modelling Tool ? A Preliminary Development

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary development of a Web-based Product Modelling Tool (WPMT) aimed at enabling collaborative design through the Internet using JAVA 3D with dispersed team members. It is motivated by the emerging need of distant collaborative design required among R&D centres and manufacturers of global-based enterprises, simply to shorten product cycle time and, hence, to enhance their world-wide competitiveness. In this paper, current web 3D technologies are discussed first, then the general architecture of the underlying WPMT is introduced. The proposed WPMT is developed to allow designers/users to create, view, and manipulate product models through the World Wide Web. The main architecture of the proposed WPMT uses a Java servlet embedded in an HTML web page, which can be viewed and edited by authorised users with a Java/Java 3D enabled browser through the Internet. The developed WPMT is to be run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so it is independent of the operation system and computer platform. Since the WPMT is a web-based modelling tool, some handy built-in primary features such as block, wedge, rim, hole, pocket, etc. are included for users to develop their product models. The users can also create their own features as so-called user-defined features. In addition, viewing operations such as rotation, zooming, panning, orthographic projections and so on, are also made available for comprehensiveness in the integrated web-based solid modelling tool. Finally, the proposed WPMT is experimentally implemented.