Web Service Oriented Standard Product Library

Using standard components or modules is vital in product design, development and manufacturing. The current book type catalogues and those, in the form of electronic files together with CAD drawings distributed on disks or via web-based publication systems, can not meet industry requirements for collaborative engineering. Ideally, users could source competitive offers from different vendors and use their information over the Internet. The drawbacks in the current catalogues are platform dependency, and difficulties in version management, CAD file translation, and catalogue content updating. In this research, a novel “Web Service” oriented approach is proposed to address these limitations. Based on an in-house standard component and assembly library, a new method is proposed to engage a CAD modeler with Java Web Service technology. With such an approach, all the aforementioned drawbacks are eliminated. Moreover, the new method avoids hard coding of catalogues within CAD systems, facilitates the catalogue vendors to update their databases at any time. Taking injection molding design as an example, the authors discussed key mechanisms in its implementation and the feasibility of industrial applications.