DIJA system: a CAD solution for collaboration between designers and manufacturers

Abstract

This paper presents reasons and requirements of Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) emergence, and outlines the way we think future CAD systems should be - supporting more and more product life cycle-related notions - and how they should be implicated in the PLM concept. Precisely, as the aim of PLM is to connect all actors' knowledge, future CAD systems are expected to deal with notions such as cost, quality or time. Because of the complexity of PLM, this paper concentrates only on the interactions between designers and manufacturers. We show that DIJA project, which is based on a new design methodology called 'synthetic design', formalises manufacturing issues into logical and mathematical rules and integrates these into product design process in order to shorten redesign time. The presented prototype focuses on powder sintering technique, and the paper shows how our system is able to direct the user until he/she obtains a part complying with this technique.