Most engineering designers working at industries are using computers for their daily work except some of conceptual design. Usually, the same design tools are used in similar domains. Using their CAD systems designers define own features and reuse them to reduce the development cycle time. The features can be implemented based on a knowledge-based system which automatically create geometric models or check their validity. The user defined features which have the form of "macro" or "procedure" can be used by other designers.
Design offices of a company are scattered physically and connected logically through the internet. The design information of 2D CAD data is shared among participating designers. To improve designer productivity, design information that includes knowledge and is scattered across design offices should be shared.
This paper studies about the collaborative design environment with distributed knowledge-base. A product design environment based on distributed knowledge-base is proposed, which integrate the OMG's CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), the Microsoft's OLE(Object Link and Embedding) and WWW(World Wide Web) as the network architecture, a 3D CAD system, and an expert system shell. A design example of the lens barrel of a projection television is implemented to verify the idea.
