We have been developing a system which could assist designers in performing concurrent manufacturing system design. They now often design a new manufacturing system based on the line which produces a similar product. However, they can not refer to the know-how and the design process to design these lines. Nowadays, PDM (Product Data Management) software is being used by manufacturing companies and some of them manage not only product data but also manufacturing data by PDM. However, the main use of PDM is just to provide information. In order to analyze the design process, we have designed a virtual manufacturing system in cooperation with three companies cooperation and described its design process. Based on its analysis, we have developed a system to actively support the design process using design process and design element models. The design process model consists of three elements, which include the design parameters, reference parameters and the design know-how. The features of our system are to store the design know-how, show the scope related by the design changes, link the manufacturing simulator, produce documents based on the XML (Extensible Markup Language) techniques, etc.
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