This paper addresses some key issues in supporting product family design in a 3D CAD/PDM integrated system and introduces the techniques developed or adopted in building the integrated system. The general architecture of a 3D CAD/PDM integrated system is organized as five tiers. Multi-agent technology is applied with a collaborative design environment. The rule-based product family architecture (PFA) and tabular layouts of article characteristics (TLAC) technique are applied to represent the knowledge for product families. They make the knowledge understandable, simplified and can be exchanged among heterogeneous information systems. A transparently concentric integrated mode is put forward to enable the heterogeneous processes to interact and communicate regardless of the language used to construct each process. With the mode, function calling and information exchanging among different processes are carried out via message translation/parse approach. Currently, the integrated system is implemented in the platform of Windows NT and 2000.
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