Realizing XML driven design activity for mold & die design

To improve design quality and efficiency, many studies have been conducted around design reuse and design information integration. One of the methods is to make records of design activities and reuse them. Traditional methods, e.g. design reports, minutes and records, all use design-record mechanism to record the design activities, where the records information are often in weakly structured form, partially, personal errors or mixture with useless data, and therefore lack good mechanisms for information retrieval and unable to really realize design reuse. This paper presents a framework to realize XML driven design activity to support design reuse for mold & die design, which draws on the successful experience of Business Process Execute Language. The proposed framework builds design activity templates and makes XML file to drive the design activities, like business activities driven by Business Process Execute Language files, and very different from the design-record systems. Thus the design process is recorded in a more structured, complete and computer-interpretable form with less human error which makes the design XML file easier to reuse. An illustrative example is included for demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed XML driven design activity framework. The framework explores a new approach to research the reuse of design.