Role-based 3D visualisation for asynchronous PLM collaboration

Abstract

Secure and pervasive 3D CAD model sharing among all collaborative participants is vital to successful Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications. However, existing product data management (PDM) solutions only provide rigid 3D data access control mechanism like 'all-or-nothing' scenario and thus prevents companies from sharing their 3D data effectively. 3D data sharing can be facilitated if proper technologies are available to break the previous two-grade (grant-or-deny) scheme into more levels and present to a user a 3D model with proper level of detail reduction. Therefore, a collaborator can work on his 3D data as full model while viewing other models in lighter visualisation as mesh or bounding boxes. This paper proposes role-based visualisation to realise the above concept and a prototype system is developed to validate the proposed approach in commercial CAD/PDM applications. Several key issues and future work are discussed. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.