Web-based design and manufacturing systems for automobile components: architectures and usability studies

In this paper the architectures and usability issues of web-based software tools are discussed. For the development of automobile lighting components, various designers, developers and manufacturing personnel are involved, each group needing different software tools. On the one hand, traditional part designers use powerful, 3D CAD systems that usually run on UNIX machines. On the other hand, product engineers, optical engineers and marketing personnel have limited access to such CAD systems. In this Smartlite project, several software tools were thus developed and then tested using two different user interfaces (UIs); the first was based on a commercial CAD system and the second was based on a web browser. The specific focus of this study is a user-based comparison between the new web-based UIs, and the UIs on commercial CAD systems. The usability data have been collected from the users and showed that the web-based UIs provided comparable functionality with the CAD-based UIs in terms of performance and usefulness. For the criteria of accessibility, the web-based tools out-performed the CAD-based tools. As well as the comparison of software tools for different user groups, different communication architectures of the web-based modules were tested and discussed.