An interactive and integrated framework for collaborative product development in cloud manufacturing using STEP standard-based ontology model.

Abstract

Due to the growing competition of firms in manufacturing industries, the enhancement of the design of new products for quick and collaborative interaction of stakeholders is inevitable. A customer-oriented approach during the enhancing of product design requires the support of various stakeholders' collaboration from their functionality perspectives. Accordingly, manufacturing firms try to increase the product quality through the continuous collaboration and speeding up of the design process. Moreover, new manufacturing paradigms like cloud manufacturing require global and distributed collaboration of stakeholders. One competitive key necessity for firms is the integration of stakeholders in the design and production stages. This article has proposed an interactive and integrated framework for a cloud collaborative manufacturing system. The proposed framework uses the international STEP standard which ensures data integrity in the whole product development processes. The framework enables stakeholders to work collaboratively and interactively in their disciplines, while it also ensures coherency of modifications to avoid conflicts. The proposed model is introduced using an improvisational design method based on the STEP standard to create an interactive platform with a service-oriented approach and supports stakeholders for their own semantics. In addition to examining the needs of an interactive system, the article provides an architecture for implementation of this perspective. A comprehensive case study is designed to show the capabilities of the proposed framework.