A STEP-compliant Online Product Digital Library for Customized Products

Abstract

Nowadays, small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) are facing intensive competition from the global market. For these SMEs, how to better manage and record the previous product development knowledge has become a core issue for them to improve their product development process, cut down development costs, and reduce lead time. In recent years, considerable effort has been placed on developing new enabling technologies for SMEs to achieve high quality and productivity, and quickly responding to changing markets to meet customer requirements. This chapter presents our work in developing a STEP-compliant online product digital library for rapid development of high value-added customized products. The chapter focuses on how to develop the product digital library for digitizing various types of customized products. This library uses the standard for the exchange product model data (STEP) as a foundation. New methods and tools are developed to model, record, and search information such as customer requirements and expectations, engineering responses, product design, decision making, and product machining processes, etc. The recorded product information and knowledge in the library can be reused for the development of new customized products.