Functional design of manufacturing quote services for collaboration between designer and manufacturer

The increasing dynamic and distributed nature of a business and manufacturing environment makes it hard to collaborate between design and manufacturing parties. The seamless collaboration necessitates a manufacturing quote service (MQS) that delivers manufacturing quotes timely for designer's requests. After envisioning an SOA-inherited collaboration framework, the paper details MQS functionalities, and syntax and semantics of collaboration messages (i.e., RFQ and manufacturing quote). The MQS is implemented as a Web Service so as to be accessible by designers. For each RFQ, the MQS adaptively generates a responding manufacturing quote by using the DPM library and real-time shop status information. The paper also presents an evolution process that shows the whole process of RQF generation from given product design data. The proposed framework enabled partners to exchange engineering data rapidly and adaptively during the dynamic collaboration, and also increased the benefits of distributed and global production.