An integrated framework for collaborative product design and assembly based on STEP compatible ontology model in cloud manufacturing

Abstract Nowadays, new product development processes are encountering fast design and development cycles. This issue has become one the main competition factors among industries. Accordingly, companies make drastic efforts to enhance the quality and speed in the realm of designing and manufacturing by taking novel approaches. Using the potential of new technologies, they design and develop products worldwide, and integrate stakeholders in the collaborative process to achieve this goal. This study has aimed at laying a foundation to fulfill the requirements for globalized collaborative product development processes. This creates an opportunity for both an integrated and collaborative environment. As first objective, the paper has proposed STEP Standard-based model in the form of a cloud service model to create an integrated data structure for product design data while giving flexibility for service-oriented access to integrated model. For second objective, using the Ontology interoperability model, the collaborative design among the stakeholders has been enabled through smart interference control. This control interprets the data semantic to an ontology structure and detects the potential conflicts. The model supports two levels of parts in singular and collective form and based on the assembly scheme for collaborative design and development. Different facets of the proposed model are addressed to fulfill the necessity of real-time distributed collaboration in designing and assembling via a case study.