The development of an Internet-enabled semi-automated fixture design system

Design of a fixture is a complex and an intuitive process. An efficient fixture design system is essential to cut costs and to reduce lead-time. The paper addresses the development of a simple Internet-enabled semi-automated fixture design system, to demonstrate that true 3D fixture design can be carried out over the Internet. The whole system has been developed in Java and Java3D to ensure that the benefits of Java technology are obtained for Internet viability considerations such as portability and good client-server computing performance. The system is currently implemented based on a simple 3-tier thin client-fat server architecture using Java's remote method invocation. Design communications are currently carried out in the form of an open, self-extensible Xtensible Modeling Language scheme. The developed system coupled with a standard fixture element database so that the user will be able to carry out the task of designing the fixture assembly, while the bulk of the computation in terms of fixture design rules and constraints is carried out on a central server. The development of this system aims to provide users with easy access to basic fixture design functionality at a small fraction of the cost of employing a dedicated commercial modeling program operating as a backend.