Collaboration And Virtual Early Prototyping Using The Distributed Building Site Metaphor

© IDEA Group Publishing. The document is included by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work only on a non commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered there works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.Rapid Prototyping within a virtual environment offers new possibilities of working. In order to reduce the design time and define better specifications, concurrent engineering shall be addressed at the early stage of a concept phase. The presentation defines different concepts namely Virtual Prototyping, Rapid Prototyping and Virtual Early Prototyping. VEP improves the Rapid Prototyping providing important leverage on the problem of collaboration.The state of art shows that the current solutions offer a limited collaboration. Within the context of an extended team, the solutions do not address how to move easily from one style of working to another one. They do not define how to manage the rapid design of a complex product. Moreover, the different propositions suffer mainly from the client-server approach that is inefficient in many ways and limits the openness of the system. One explains also that the Internet protocols are best suited to develop collaborative services within a VEP system. That state of art enables to explain that CORBA, MPEG-4 and multimedia protocols are not adapted to solve the problem of collaboration.A case study is used to show that our solution enables an efficient collaboration. The paper presents a global methodology enabling different styles of work. Thus, an extended team manages easily the concurrent design of a complex product. A way to start a project among a geographically dispersed team is proposed. It enables to manage different design teams in a secure way over the Internet. Afterwards, the different teams reach a kick-off meeting to set-up the initial proposal of the specification. Then, each team works on a system design in a distributed and collaborative way. Thus, private works are merged and consolidated easily. Work reviews solve the interdependencies between the different systems. At last, a project review enables to conciliate the different proposals into a satisfying solution. Our solution provides practical advantages namely a design in context to avoid speculation by default, a method breaking down the complexity, a decrease of the design time and an increase of the quality.The case study is derived into a set of general requirements for a VEP tool. Thus, the major functional services are identified. Afterwards, the paper presents a new solution to satisfy the VEP requirements. It proposes new collaboration services that can be used to distribute a virtual scene between the designers. Our solution, called the Distributed Building Site Metaphor, enables project management, meeting management, parallel working, disconnected work and meeting work, real time validation, real time modification, real time conciliation, real time awareness, easy motion between these styles of work, consistency, security and persistency. In contrast with the other solutions, our services enable parallel work while preserving consistency. These services do not require or implement a reliable multicasting. They are fully distributed and do not require any specific quality of service from the under-laying network. DBSM can add collaboration to any standalone application