Integration of the CAD/PDM/ERP System Based on Collaborative Design

The increasing requirement and product complexity need a new design method for the global market. The collaborative design is an important style for the requirement. The CAD system for design is connected with the Product data management (PDM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for management. PDM can support the management of engineering data and the product development. A methodology for the PDM/ERP/CAD integration is proposed. Firstly, the interest of integration of PDM/ERP/CAD is introduced. Then the UML-based methodology is applied for the product data integration model. The PDM structure model diagram and the class model diagram are introduced. Workflow method for the method is introduced. By workflow method, the data publican is realized by the trigger. The data among systems can be visited and exchanged by the methodology. As a result, the design and management models are modified, simultaneously and maintained consistently. The methodology is applied for a system by means of an example, which achieves a good result.

1. Introduction

During the progress of the technology, the mechanical computer aided design (CAD) has experienced a few innovation steps. With the development of the information technology (IT), the collaborative design and the distributed design is a major step for CAD. The increasing requirement and complexity of product need a new design method to suit the global market. The collaborative design can work for the designers to share the whole work process with globally manufacture by internet. The collaborative design system allows designers to work closely with suppliers, manufacturing partners, and customers across enterprises' firewall to get a valuable input into the design chain [1]. The collaborative design includes the concept design, design in detail, process planning and so on. The computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), computer-aided manufacture (CAM), enterprise resource planning(ERP) and the product data management (PDM) systems can be integrated in a collaborative design system, which support the data of systems exchange well for the production lifecycle (PLM). However, the separated system is heterogeneous when they are developed. So the integration for the system is an important problem for collaborative design. The PDM system also has the problem of exchanging product data with legacy systems, especially with the CAD system that generates the product data [2].