Collaborative System for Cutting Data Management Based on STEP Standard

Recent research work concerning cooperative and concurrent engineering, increasingly interest industrial firms. Companies can no longer ignore this approach due to industrial needs such as improvement of quality and reduction of cost and delay. The objective of this paper is to propose an approach allowing the different experts or firms, to cooperate via Internet. To facilitate the communication of information among experts and to suppress the organizational borders of companies, STEP Standards is a viable tool that can be used in this frame. Nevertheless some tools have to be developed to give accessible STEP technology to the different actors. As an application study, the cutting process field is considered. Actually, STEP does not propose any parts for such field, so we have developed different standard models based on STEP methodology. These models have been validated by industrial cases. We have also proposed a methodology for cooperative work and an infrastructure architecture based on internet tools. An example of software prototype interface shows how different experts can share their different points of views at both information models and data. Finally the problems encountered by our proposed approach are explained and future works are presented.