Web-based design and manufacturing support systems: implementation perspectives

With the great progress of web technology in the past few years, many approaches have been proposed to implementing web-based systems for design and manufacturing. However, the implementation of the approaches and associated systems is not an easy task because design and manufacturing are normally sophisticated engineering operations. In this paper the authors present an engineering approach for implementing web-based design and manufacturing support systems. The implementation issues are critically discussed with an exemplar-a web-based bearing design support system developed by the authors. These issues include design information integration, remote execution of the systems, use of Java programming, client - server architecture, open computing and user interface design, and the human - computer interaction aspects.