Web-enabled collaborative environment for integrated design and manufacture

A web-enabled environment has been developed for integration of design and manufacture. The software environment consists of four tires: database tier, application server tier, web server tier and client tier. It has been applied into the design and manufacture of mechanical power transmission systems. In this paper, the architecture of the environment is presented first, followed by the detail description of its three key aspects including CORBA broker for collaboration, remote design using Java Servlets and online CAD drawing.