A Shared Multi-Media Design Environment for Concurrent Engineering over the Internet

Abstract

The Internet is currently an important resource for businesses to conduct activities ranging from basic communication to data exchange. In addition, the Internet is fast becoming an important portal for concurrent engineering applications. The Virtual Design Studio (VDS) presented in this paper is to construct a virtual design environment over the Internet in order to over come geographical constraints, and satisfy the major issues of concurrent engineering. Traditional design activities have been studied and implemented in the VDS to enable effective and efficient collaborative design. In addition, the proposed virtual design environment also supports both the product design and distributed communication tools used by designers. The aim of VDS is to integrate the exist ing information technologies (such as remote file transfer, multimedia and virtual reality among others) into the design process and to ex plore the possibility of extending collaborative design system over the Internet. This infrastructure will enable the establishment of distrib uted design offices in a global environment by means of the Internet. As such, collaborative design resources can be made readily available to industries, research institutions and educational institutions. CyberCAD is the application developed to support the realization of VDS. Remote file transfer and platform independence have been implemented in CyberCAD to enable the sharing of resources. CyberCAD provides a powerful collaborative CAD system running on a PC based platform. A multimedia communication enabled CAD conference module has been integrated into CyberCAD. Video and audio communications provide the collaborative multimedia environment, which overcome the geographical limitation in traditional "face to face" collaboration and enhances interaction between designers. Drag and drop method has been adopted in the proposed CAD conference module for re mote design information sharing.