Step-based data sharing and exchange in one-of-A-kind product collaborative design for cloud manufacturing

With the trend for global collaboration, there is a need for collaborative design between geographically distributed teams and companies. In particular, this need is inevitable in the companies doing their business based on one-of-A-kind production (OKP). One important problem is the lack of interoperability and compatibility of data between different CAx systems. This problem is further highlighted in data exchange in cloud manufacturing. To the best of authors' knowledge, current studies have limitations in achieving the interoperability and compatibility of data. In this paper, a STEP-based data model is proposed to represent OKP product data/knowledge, which contains four categories of product knowledge (i.e., customer, product, manufacturing, and resource resp.). A STEP-based data modelling approach is proposed to describe each category of knowledge separately and then connect them to form the final integrated model. Compared with most current product models, this model includes the more complete product data/knowledge involved in OKP product development (OKPPD), and thus it can provide more adequate knowledge support for OKPPD activities. Based on the proposed STEP-based data model, a product data exchange and sharing (DES) framework is proposed and developed to enable DES in collaborative OKPPD in the cloud manufacturing environment. Case studies were carried out to validate the proposed data model and DES framework.