Design agility and manufacturing responsiveness on the Web

This paper is to investigate a Web‐based engineering approach to enable engineers to use, share, and simulate effectively and efficiently design and manufacturing data through the World Wide Web. The enabling techniques to implement such an approach are critically discussed with an example based on a tolerancing application and two Java‐based machining simulators for e‐manufacturing purposes, as well as an example of real‐time 3D implementation. The outcome of this research is for helping designers and manufacturing engineers to be able accurately to make the right decisions for their respective purposes.