UL-PML: constraint-enabled distributed product data model

The global economy has made manufacturing industry more distributed than ever before. Product design requires more involvement from various technical disciplines at different locations. In such a geographically and temporally distributed environment, efficient and effective collaboration on design is vital to maintain product quality and organizational competency. Current standard computeraided design data formats do not support design collaboration effectively in terms of design information and knowledge capturing, exchange, and integration. Design constraints cannot be represented and transferred among different groups, and design information cannot be integrated efficiently within a distributed environment. A new design data model, the Universal Linkage model, is developed here to represent design-related information for network-based collaborative design. It incorporates geometric and non-geometric constraints with traditional geometric elements, thus allowing more design knowledge sharing in collaborative design. Segments of design information can be linked and integrated into a set of complete product data. Thus, lean information exchange can be realized. This model, which has good properties of openness and extensibility, is represented by Directed Hyper Graph and Product Markup Language.