Development of a STEP-based collaborative product and process development system for manufacturability evaluation with reverse engineering

The prevailing "design for manufacture" technique can reduce the cost and time for the product and process development. Recently, reverse engineering has played an important role either in design or in manufacture to accelerate product and process development. In this paper, a system based on the product data exchange standard STEP (STandard for Exchange of Product model data) has been developed to integrate the new technologies such as network and videoconferencing to form innovative strategy in enhancing the competitiveness of an enterprise. The developed system is focused on the information-recording module based upon STEP. The module can be used to record key information during collaborative design processes with reverse engineering, and can be transformed into the suggestion information for manufacturability evaluation in the following manufacturing processes. It also can provide a reference for further development for the application protocol of reverse engineering activities. The system model proposed in this paper provides a new algorithm in speeding up the product and process development cycle, reducing development cost by sharing knowledge and experience.