Development of collaborative design environment with heterogeneous CAD system.

Abstract

Traditional CAD (Computer-Aided Design) technologies focused on the interactive process between a computer and a single user. This shortcoming greatly constrains distributed collaboration. Collaborative CAD systems have been proposed to facilitate resolution in team design and have gained increasing attention and are considered as the next generation CAD solutions. Ideally, such a collaborative CAD system allows a group of designers, often geographically dispersed, to work seamlessly with one another over a distributed network during a real-time design process. Most of previous research efforts in this area concentrated on incorporating network functions into a typical CAD system in order to enable the mechanisms of collaborative design. The problem is that these research efforts are developed on a specific CAD system, thus restricted.