A Testbed to Support Collaboration Among Distributed Designers for Reverse Engineering, Re-Engineering and Fast Manufacturing

This paper presents development of a testbed to support collaboration among a set of distributed engineers to reverse, re-engineer, and fast manufacture (RRF) components for aging aircrafts. This testbed allows a geographically distributed team to work on a design task both synchronously and asynchronously. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software tools and equipment that support the RRF process have been identified, evaluated, and tested. An integration framework has also been developed and employed to create an RRF testbed. This testbed constructed using COTS software and equipment supports three major engineering tasks: the reverse engineering that supports recovering of technical data from worn sample parts, re-engineering that alters design for better performance or lower cost, and fast prototyping that incorporates advanced manufacturing technologies to produce functional or physical prototype of the part in small quantity in a short turnaround time. Traditional reverse engineering projects are ad-hoc, usually takes relatively long time to generate solid models from physical parts. The developed testbed utilizes commercial software to accomplish reverse engineering, re-engineer and fast manufacture using a systematic approach. A number of examples obtained from logistics centers have been employed to illustrate and demonstrate the capabilities established in the RRF testbed.