Study on scale-free product collaborative design supporting platform

In this paper, a knowledge resource and grid idea based collaborative product design supporting platform was proposed which emphasized on the efficient organization and management of design supporting resources, and instead the database of traditional product design system with a dynamic and scale-free resource network. Furthermore, a new concept of scale-free product design resource network was proposed and used to discover the topology of the design resource network, and enable the design resource management more efficient and help to optimize the design resource configuration. Furthermore, a six-tiers platform architecture was proposed which enables substantial saving in the cost and the product development time in a network environment. The concept of scale-free network, the architecture of the platform, the involved key technologies and the application of a prototype were discussed.