Feature and Product Markup Languages in service-oriented CAX collaboration

The competitive and open market nature demands different vendors to collaborate during the product life cycle and to reduce the product’s time to market. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to enable the concurrent collaboration of heterogeneous Computer Aided tools for concurrent engineering aspect X (CAX) at the feature level using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. A Feature Markup Language (FML) and a Product Markup Language (PML) are proposed as the modeling and communication media for feature and product information representation and exchanges which can be independent to operating system and programming language. How to employ the concept of software factory to leverage FML as a Domain Specific Language (DSL) is discussed for the process of feature development and distribution. Moreover, the underlying architecture is described to enable CAX information sharing in real-time preserving the semantics and consistency.