A Web-based platform for Collaborative Product Design and Evaluation

Konstantinos Smparounis, Kosmas Alexopoulos, Vagelis Xanthakis, Menelaos Pappas, Dimitris Mavrikios, George Chryssolouris*
Laboratory for Manufacturing System and Automation, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, 26500 Patras, Greece, *Corresponding authors email: xrisol@lms.mech.upatras.gr
Abstract This paper presents a web-based integrated platform for supporting the collaborative product design activities. An overview of the overall Digital Factory framework, in which the Collaborative Prototype Designer (CPD) resides, has been given first. Next, the CPDs functional architecture is presented including the way it addresses the needs for collaboration during the product design process. The CPD is based on the integration of a spectrum of technologies, including Content Management, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Virtual & Augmented Reality (VR/AR) and Decision Support, through a Web-based user friendly interface. The major contribution of the proposed approach is the CPDs flexible architecture, which takes into consideration the design needs of both mechanical and nonmechanical products and it is therefore, considered being applicable to a wide range of products. It integrates design activities, processes, methods and tools in a modular feature, easy to be used and be enhanced even further. The CPD mainly aims at SMEs that usually cannot afford an expensive commercial solution, for supporting of the collaborative product design. Keywords Collaborative Product Design, Multi-user Prototype Review, Decision Support, Virtual / Augmented Reality, Online Product Demonstration

1 Introduction
Product development is the result of a network based collaborative design process, since most of the projects, which are usually geographically distributed for the design of a new product, require co-operation among expert groups with diverse competence.[Chryssolouris, 2006]. A collaborative product design project is necessary to take into consideration issues related to the users integration, organization and communication, as well as to product data sharing, management and visualization. New and efficient paradigms of a web-based collaborative product design, in a global economy, will be driven by increased outsourcing and the reduction of product development time [Draghici et al., 2007]. These constitute the motivation for the conceptualization of the proposed framework of an integrated web-based platform in support of the collaborative design activities. This is a holistic solution, applying mainly to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), which cannot usually afford to integrate, in their processes, sophisticated large-scale commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions for a collaborative product design. The CPD system serves as a multi-user real-time collaboration tool for supporting product development activities and it could be used efficiently by designers, engineers, managers, suppliers and customers. It enables single users and/or user groups to work in a collaborative way, even if they are dispersed over different sites, without changing the existing design environment. It provides the infrastructure necessary to make engineering teams efficient, by improving their productivity, which results in decreasing considerably the time required for the designing phase to be completed. The key contribution of this system is its architecture that

integrates the CAD/VR/AR environments, into a modular system, easy to use and manage. Some of the benefits by using the system are: Quick and easy product data storage and sharing through an easy to use web-based content management platform. Synchronous and asynchronous communication among distributed individuals or user groups. Real-time cooperation for the geometrical design of the product models. Multi-user visualization and interaction with shared virtual product prototypes. Decision support for the evaluation of the alternative product designs / variants. Online demonstration and customization of products into a 3D interactive environment.

2 Background
A great number of Web-based systems have been developed for supporting collaborative activities, in the different life-cycle phases of a products development. These include marketing, design, process planning, production, distribution, service, etc. Distributed product development life-cycle activities, in a globally integrated environment, are associated with the use of internet as well as with web technologies. Some product development software systems have been integrated, through web technologies, into web-based collaboration systems [Yang et al., 2003]. Related to the web-based collaborative product design systems are: Immersive Discussion Tool (IDT), cPAD [Shyamsundar et al., 2002], Detailed Virtual Design System (DVDS) [Arangarasan et al., 2000], Virtual-based Collaborative Environment (VRCE) [Kan et al., 2001], Web-enabled Product Data Management (PDM) [Xu et al., 2003]. Moreover, a few commercial tools, such as the OneSpace.net [CoCreate, 2009], IBMs Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Express Portfolio, eDrawings Professional [Solidworks, 2009], Matrix10 [MatrixOne, 2009], are also available. However, the global market still lacks in collaboration tools, capable of providing both Virtual Reality (VE) and Decision Making techniques with the possibility of product design evaluation. Most collaborative tools are related more to a PLM environment and less to shared Virtual Environments. Thus, the research work described in this paper, has been focused on the development of a web-based platform for product collaborative design, in full co-operation with an interactive and immersive VE to support the advanced visualization of a product prototype, as well as to provide multi-user navigation and interaction capabilities along with a smart decision support system for strengthening the products design evaluation procedure.

3 Digital Factory Framework

A Digital Factory depicts a persistent hybrid community, where a rich virtualized environment allows the representation of a variety of product life cycle activities, the sharing of their resources including manufacturing information and knowledge, the simulation of collaborative design, and the planning, production and management among the different participants and departments. The research work has been conducted in the frame of the DiFac project [DiFac, 2009], which aims at developing an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for the next generation of digital manufacturing. The DiFac CME will be used as a framework for supporting group work, in an immersive and interactive way, for concurrent Product Development, Factory Design and Evaluation, as well as for the workers Training. This framework is based on key aspects of the Human Factors of a Digital Factory, that is Presence, Collaboration and Ergonomics. Six components, namely the Group Presence

Modeller, the Immersive Integrator, the Collaboration Manager, the Collaborative Prototype Designer, the Factory Constructor and the Training Simulator have been integrated into a new solution for collaborative digital manufacturing activities. These components support the teams collaboration on the analysis of a product design, sharing information, evaluating testing results, managing knowledge and making decisions concerning product development issues.

4 CPD Functional Architecture

The CPD functional architecture specifies the way the system answers to the product design within a digital factory framework. This functional architecture is generic, taking into consideration the design needs of both mechanical and non-mechanical products and it is therefore, considered being applicable to a wide range of products. The main functional steps of the system are: Product Design: This phase starts when the end-user has decided to proceed with a new product design. The customers input, market surveys, previous products information and experts knowledge, typically serve as the starting point of this activity. The actors involved (designers, engineers, suppliers, etc.) will be able to login into the CPD platform, review the product-related stuff, share files, communicate in order to share ideas, knowledge, opinions and data, aiming at defining the requirements for the new products design. After the definition of the product requirements, the design phase starts, where a shared workspace will enable the real-time collaborative design of the alternative geometrical product models. Product Review: The geometrical product models will be used for creating the alternative virtual prototypes, which will be reviewed next, within a shared virtual environment, for the testing and evaluation of specific characteristics of the alternative designs. During the collaboration session, designers, suppliers and even customers will be able to actively participate simultaneously in this review session. Furthermore, the engineers dealing with manufacturing and assembly operations should review the alternatives solutions in order to comprehend the development phases, including assembly sequences, times and tools required, etc. According to the assembly experts observations, feedback may be required to be given to the designers for any modifications in the product components, which may drive to new assessments early in the design phase. Product Evaluation: In order to assist experts identify the best design alternative, a multi-criteria decision support module is used. Each alternative will be evaluated, based on several criteria, such as aesthetics, cost, performance, etc., taking into consideration the respective weights of each criterion, on the final decision. Product Authoring & Demonstration: During the last step, the final product designs are ready to be uploaded to the online product catalogue. The customers would be able to use this functionality in order to explore, on-line, all the products available, in a standalone mode or within a 3D interactive environment.

5 CPD Component Architecture

The platform is designed, based on an open architecture and a Browser/Server technology that follows the three-tier example and includes: the data layer, the business layer and the presentation layer. These layers communicate through the internet or an intranet, depending on the type of communication. Oracle is used for the platforms database implementation and for the connection mechanism among the mainframe PC and the application (JavaServer), the Java Bean Architecture, which contains the work-division planning algorithm and the database interactions.

Figure 1: CPD conceptual framework

The CPD integrated platform consists of the following components, each one comprising several modules. A detailed presentation of the CPDs components, modules and user workflow is presented in the diagram below: 1. A Web-based Collaboration platform that supports brainstorming and a user friendly communication and product data management. It also provides a 3D interactive presentation of products, through an AR and/or VR-based product showrooms. 2. A Collaborative CAD module that enables distributed real-time co-design of the 3D geometry models of the new product components. 3. A Virtual Reality module(s) that enables product design and assembly review within a shared VR environment facilitating visualization and interaction with virtual prototypes and alternative assembly sequences. 4. A Decision Support module that supports the evaluation of the alternative solutions, based on a set of criteria in order for a final decision to be reached.

Figure 2: CPDs components and user workflow

5.1

Web-based Collaboration platform

An 'in-house' developed Web-based platform, which is the continuation of a previous development work [Pappas et al. 2006; Mavrikios et al. 2007; Chryssolouris et al. 2008; Smparounis et al. 2008], provides an efficient and robust collaboration tool for supporting the cooperative product design, from the early up to the latest stages of the conceptual design of the production life cycle. This module constitutes the bus platform for the integration of the external applications, namely a collaborative CAD tool for the product design, a collaborative VR platform for the creation of the working (virtual) environment, a decision support system for the evaluation of the product alternative designs and finally, an AR environment for the online product demonstration and customisation. The innovative concept of this platform lies in the competence of the above integration, together with the easy and user friendly communication and product data management and mainly, on the critical consideration of presence, collaboration and ergonomics, throughout its development. The web platform consists of the following modules: Authentication Module: This module provides security and blocks any unauthorised access attempt into the system .Users should register first, prior to be assigned by the platform administrator the proper rights and privileges of accessing the data and services of the electronic collaborative environment. Communication Module: This module enables remote synchronous and asynchronous communication, such as VoIP (Skype), private/public chat and email. Data Management Module: This module provides a shared working space, users roles and access rights management. It also offers a mechanism for the automatic project file versioning, thus providing the users with an easy way of keeping track of all recent modifications made on product designs. Authoring Module: This module enables the users to upload the new product models to the companys online catalogue, so that product information can be made available to customers. The user is able to explore the web based catalogue of the product and interact with them in a 3D mode (VRML-based product presentation). The user has the options to visualise the product in several 3D modes (standalone, AR, VR).

5.2

Collaborative CAD tool

An 'in house' collaborative CAD tool (CoDesigner) has been developed to allow users (product/part designers) to have real-time, on-line, concurrent CAD sessions. Users are provided with a standard CAD functionality (e.g. design curves, surfaces, solids etc). Those participating in the collaboration session will have the capability of concurrently viewing and modifying the attributes of the geometry model, thus being provided with the ability to make real-design changes and being able to create different design alternatives. The CAD files generated from such a collaboration session can be saved in formats that can be exported to other CAD/VR/AR systems. These formats currently are: STEP, IGES, BREP, STL, and VRML. The focus being on the real-time collaboration capability, the CoDesigner has been providing so far, standard 3D CAD functionality (compared to other world class tools). However, it has the potential to be extended with additional geometric modelling features. It can be also integrated with other CAD tools providing them with a multi-user collaboration functionality. The users participating in the collaboration session share and work on a common CAD model therefore, the design changes are populated in real-time to the model instances of all the participants. The CoDesigner consists of the following modules: CAD Kernel: The CAD kernel is based on the Open Cascade engine [Open CASCADE, 2009].

Application Framework: This module provides access to the CAD kernel functionality and enables the management of the geometry model information. Collaboration Manager: This module handles the collaboration among different CoDesigner applications and enables it to be integrated with other CAD tools (in terms of collaboration). Collaboration Broker: This module is based on the Apache Active MQ message broker. Different CoDesigner application instances may communicate by subscribing and publishing topics in the server.

Figure 3: Collaborative session for geometric modelling in co Designers environment

5.3

Virtual Reality platforms

The integration of a VR platform into the CPD allows users to create, share, review and customize, in a collaborative way, the virtual prototype of the product. A commercial VR platform [PTC DIVISION MockUp 2009] and a non-commercial 3D viewer [Vigano et al., 2007], have been integrated into the CPD platform and have been tested with different design review use cases. In the case of complex mechanical products, the VR platform allows users to co-create the virtual prototype by importing the geometry models built during the collaborative CAD session.

Figure 4: Virtual prototyping through the integrated VR platforms (commercial/non-commercial)

Additionally, users are able to navigate and interact into the virtual environment. Typical scene building functions (e.g. lighting, add/remove geometry, colouring and material selection etc) are provided. Moreover, the assembly design can take place in this frame along with product

performance evaluation. The users can collaboratively test/review design alternatives. The CPD flexible and modular architecture will allow, in future, the integration with several other commercial or research VR/AR tools that would fit better to the design review needs.

5.4

Multi-Criteria Decision Support application

Based on previous research work, [Chryssolouris, 1987; Chryssolouris et al., 1994, Chryssolouris et al., 2000; Alexopoulos et al., 2007], a Multi-Criteria Decision Support (MCDS) tool has been developed to provide decision making assistance to a group of experts, in the final phase of the collaborative product design, by evaluating and comparing alternative product designs. Initially, the manager of the design project identifies the set of the criteria (both qualitative and quantitative) to be used for the evaluation of the different design alternatives, together with the relative criteria weights. Following this set-up, the participants of the collaborative evaluation session (design experts) indicate values for the qualitative criteria (e.g. aesthetics) of design alternatives. The quantitative criteria (e.g. process-related) may take values directly from the product simulation that takes place during the prototype review sessions. As a result, the decision engine provides a relative ranking of design alternative solutions, and consequently, a metrics based proposition as to the good (best ranked) ones. MCDS is a web based application and is composed of the following modules: Evaluation Core: This module is responsible for the calculation of each alternatives score. Its input is a list of alternative solutions, a list of criteria with their relative weight, a list of evaluators and the scores of the evaluators for each alternative-criterion pair. The output is a ranking of the alternatives, based on the calculated scores. Data Source: This module handles the persistency of the domain data and is responsible for the serialization of the data from XML format into memory data structures and vice versa. Application Manager: This module is responsible for managing the dataflow among the data source, the external actors (such as end user's and other applications) and the evaluation core. Additionally, it provides basic security/login functionality.

Figure 5: Configuration phase into the MCDS tool

6 Conclusions
The CPD provides functionality for real-time collaboration, among geographically dispersed user groups during product design, review, evaluation and demonstration. One of the systems major benefits is the improvement of the design process, by enabling real-time collaboration and

communication among distributed design centres, besides providing multi-user navigation and interaction capabilities through a shared virtual environment. The system also supports the grouped decision making process consequently, decreasing the overall product development time and cost. The CPD system, which mainly targets SMEs that usually cannot afford a commercial solution, has been successfully tested in real-life industrial design use cases, for both mechanical (e.g. laser machine) and non-mechanical (e.g. carpet) products.
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