Collaborative Engine for Distributed Mechanical Design

Abstract

Effective collaboration is essential for engineers at geographically dispersed locations to accomplish good design with less iteration. Over the last several years, more and more efforts have been put into such research as many industries have distributed their product development to locations with knowledge force. This paper presents a collaborative engine to facilitate collaborations among distributed mechanical designs. Using component-based software technology, collaboration functionality is developed into a set of groupware that makes the collaborative engine applicable to develop new collaborative applications or integrate legacy applications into collaborative environments. An XML-based information representation is developed to streamline the information transmission within the distributed environment. A case study is carried out to show how this engine facilitates designers to collaboratively create a 3D solid model of a same part in real time.