Collaborative design creates added values in the design and production process by bringing the benefits of teamwork and cooperation in a concurrent and coordinated manner. Product data modeling is one of the key techniques to the development of computer supported collaborative design systems. In this paper, the new challenges and requirements for product data modeling are analyzed in terms of supporting design collaboration firstly. Then, a state-of-the-art review of existing approaches to product data modeling is carried out and the limitations of these approaches are examined. To overcome the limitations found with existing product data modeling approaches, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM) is proposed to facilitate the management and coordination of a collaborative design process. The proposed CPDM is established by extending the popular parametric feature-based product data model and including information required for design management and coordination. The functionalities and the data elements of the main data modules in the proposed CPDM are described in detail respectively.

This paper presents a new design optimization technique by artificial neural networks. Based on the theory of partial ordering and cones in Banach spaces, a new kind of neural networks with functional links is proposed. Learning algorithm lies heavily on the ordering structure of the sample space with an alternative feed-forward and backpropagation technique. Experiments are described with comparison with traditional functional link networks and wavelet networks.

Product design tends to be more complex and needs the effective cooperation among multidisciplinary designers and engineers. An ideal product design environment, which is both collaborative and intelligent, will be much appreciated. Agent technology is an innovative and promising approach to implementing distributed systems and is becoming popular in various areas of computing in recent years. In this paper, the dynamic nature of collaborative design process and the representation of collaborative design knowledge are presented. In order to model constantly evolving design process and the rationales resulted from collaboration, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM), which extends traditional Product Data Model (PDM), and a constraint-based Collaborative Design Process Model (CDPM) are proposed. These are intended to facilitate the management and coordination of collaborative product design process and knowledge management. A design example is used to illustrate CDPM. While the system is being implemented, the architecture of our agent-based collaborative product design environment based on CPDM and CDPM is described.

In modern design, environmentally conscious issues such as energy saving, recycling properties and maintenance etc. must be considered in the product development process. Useful environmentally conscious information can be captured, analyzed and organized as design knowledge. Early design intent of a designer can be propagated to down stream design activities using this knowledge as an evaluation index. In this context, a design intent management (DIM) module associated with a life-cycle assessment (LCA) inventory, a feature coding design knowledge base, and an automatic function-to-form mapping module are developed concurrently and embedded in an integrated environmentally conscious design (IECD) system being developed in the Design Technology Research Centre of School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A case study involving the design intent management module, the propagation module to follow-up design activities and a design knowledge base supporting decision making in engineering design process are presented In this work. The capabilities of the current system being implemented are highlighted.

As opposed to the keyboard or mouse, tangible interface is the term used to describe alternatives which often take the form of real tangible physical elements representing virtual elements. This paper presents the integration of real and virtual interactive, and discusses how to use the universal constructor as interaction elements of combined physical and virtual approaches.

This paper describes work on mapping from an abstract intelligent physical modelling system to a virtual modelling environment for design visualization. It also addresses related questions: Why is there a current revival of interest in these techniques? What is different now? Why use abstract representations? What were these systems for in the first place? What might be their new role in the future?.