Distributed CAD/CAPP/CAM integration based on STEP-PDM schema and corba-compliant PDM Enablers

As the emerging e-Tech based modern manufacturing concepts are obtaining considerable attention, the Intranetoriented information stream among separate computer-aided systems in a certain enterprise can hardly satisfy the rapidly increased concurrent requirements on collaborative design and manufacturing across heterogeneous platforms. This paper is targeted to propose a referential CORBA-based CAx integration framework to serve the distributed co-design and co-manufacturing on the basis of the newly addressed STEPPDM Schema and CORBA-compliant PDM Enablers. Compared with the conventional manners of CAx integration, the presented open-networked integration architecture is to overcome the drawbacks of complicated, redundant engineering data representation, exchange and storage, the hurdles of extending the local applications to dislocated platforms. In this paper, some key issues about STEP, PDM, STEP-PDM Schema, PDM Enablers, and CORBA are talked about as well as some further observations.