A Distributive and Collaborative Concurrent Product Design System through the WWW/Internet

Concurrent engineering involves the integration of people, tools, information, and processes into a responsive and efficient system. This paper addresses a key requirement in distributed concurrent engineering, namely, the ability for geographically dispersed and disparate parties, having heterogeneous computing platforms, to exchange design and manufacturing data. The development of an effective and efficient collaborative product design support environment based on the WWW/Internet is presented. A new method that reduces the transmission time through the use of macro files is proposed to realise the real-time communication, together with a monitoring methodology for synchronising group operations, and maintaining consistency of shared CAD models in a cooperative design review (co-modifying) process. Based on the proposed methods, a software interface has been developed to extend the traditional single location CAD software system to a multi-location application for coordinated product design through the Internet. This software interface was coded in Java. The architecture is a connection-oriented client/server structure using TCP/IP protocol. Unigraphics on a UNIX Workstation and MicroStation on Windows NT have been successfully integrated. The findings of this paper allow product designers to exchange and share product data, communicate with team members, modify geometry data on particular aspects of the design, and maintain operations consistency in all the distributed cooperative sites on a wide variety of platforms.