Tool based supporting collaborative design from specification development to CAD modelling

Abstract

Management of dynamic information interdependencies and as well as management of multiple perspectives from specification development to conceptual design, as well as from conceptual design to detailed design are critical elements of collaborative and distributed design. Supporting collaborative design with computer technology is a strategy to enhance the ability of actors to interact with each other and with computational resources during different phases of product design and development. However, many observations from the industry and research support the evidence that both specification development phase and conceptual design are poorly supported by collaborative tools. Furthermore, though CAD tools support detail design, it is imperative to develop new collaborative design tools or renovate traditional standalone CAD systems by making it collaborative-native. Consequently, the first goal of this paper is to propose the development of collaborative tools related to the conceptual design. The second goal is the development of a mechanism for communication between the developed collaborative conceptual design tools and actually CAD tools. The mechanism and architecture of the developed tool for collaborative conceptual design is presented. A design problem illustrates the concepts discussed in the paper.