This research work is devoted to realizing a feature-oriented database system in order to support concurrent and collaborative engineering. The emphasis is on feature modeling in database so that information integration and sharing can be achieved. In the current globalized market with a virtual engineering environment, it is common for engineering tasks to be carried out by a group of engineers who are distributed in terms of both time and space. Furthermore, different engineering partners may use different application systems. A literature survey carried out in this thesis reveals that although many researchers have done much work to reduce the application gaps among different processes, in-depth research is still required to model, analyze and implement a system that can manage the information throughout different stages of product life cycles. In this research project, an original four-layer information model is proposed on the basis of an extended-STEP (standard for the exchange of product model data) framework.

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