Collaborative design environment with multiple CAD systems

The existing collaborative systems are restricted on one specific CAD system and do not support multiple systems. However, employing various CAD systems to facilitate the product design process is not uncommon. This paper presents an approach for collaborative design environment to support a set of heterogeneous CAD systems such that an object can be geometrically co-modelled simultaneously among a team of designers at geographically distributed locations. A command-based solution is proposed to deal with the issues identified in developing such collaborative design system. Operations are used as the transmission data type to realize the collaboration. A prototype is implemented to show the feasibility of the solution