Advances in collaborative CAD: The-state-of-the-art

Abstract

In collaborative design and distributed manufacturing, the need to co-develop parts by designers at different geographical locations often arises. For designing a promising product, there is always a need for collaboration among the design, marketing, financial and procurement departments, and the top management. Global manufacturing makes it difficult to frequently gather all the departments in a meeting room to discuss because of geographical constraints. In order to address this issue, recently, a number of software tools and research works have arised to provide collaborative solutions. In this paper, some important works in Web-based visualization and 3D concise representations, 3D streaming technology and co-design systems and feature-/assemblybased representation are elaborated. Meanwhile, previous works done by a project led by the authors towards this direction are also highlighted.