Manufacturing collaboration resource discovery system (McRDS)

We present the details of a product prototype we are building to support collaboration and resource discovery in product development efforts. McRDS consists of a framework that integrates CAD, CAE, and office automation tools over various networking infrastructures (Internet, CORBA, etc.). Additionally, it consists of a resource discovery system which is a virtual database, whose data is physically distributed worldwide among heterogeneous product information databases. The collaboration framework supports semantic messaging and information brokering while the information discovery system performs semantic unification in order to respond to queries submitted by users. We use Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML) as the information messaging protocol and PDES/STEP application protocols to express the content of these messages.