Model compression for design synchronization within distributed environments

Abstract

Today's product development practices occur as ad-hoc fragmented value chains across distributed environments. They increasingly require distributed collaborative design capabilities for companies to cooperatively design products to be competitive. There are thus specific middleware mechanisms and capabilities needed to appropriately distribute functionality and data across the network in a complex heterogeneous computing landscape. These are part of the fundamental problems of concurrency and synchronization at various system and support levels. This paper addresses one aspect of the design synchronization problem in digital product modeling and associated design changes due to shape editing to provide timely support in distributed collaborative design. This involves exploiting the geometric/model compression technique for effective visualization and interaction.