An architecture for a distributed system for product engineering lifecycle support

An architecture has been structured to map the distributed business logic for the product engineering lifecycle. In this architecture, a commercial computer-aided design (CAD) system and an innovative computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) system, which was developed by the author and commercialised by an Australian company, are distributedly integrated using VisiBroker's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as the middleware. The architecture, presented in this paper, provides a framework for the construction of a new and innovative distributed system to support the distributed concurrent product engineering lifecycle.