Collaborative design has attracted much attention in the research community in recent years. With increasingly decentralized manufacturing systems and processes, more collaborative approaches and systems are needed to support distributed manufacturing operations. "Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing" presents a focused collection of quality chapters on the state-of-the-art research efforts in the area of collaborative design and planning, as well as their practical applications towards digital manufacturing.

"Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital...

Design and manufacturing is the essential element in any product development lifecycle. Industry vendors and users have been seeking a common language to be used for the entire product development lifecycle that can describe design, manufacturing and other data pertaining to the product. Many solutions were proposed, the most successful being the Stadndard for Exchange of Product model (STEP). STEP provides a mechanism that is capable of describing product data, independent from any particular system. The nature of this description makes it suitable not only for neutral file exchange, but...