Research on collaboration support technology and toolkits for CSCW based CAD system

We present a new approach to develop CSCD system based on single user CAD system. We used a novel collaboration framework to maintain the benefits of CSCW transparency and awareness while relieving their disadvantages. The kernel of the framework relies on CoCADToolAgent, a software agent. The communication support, protocol handling, consistency maintenance and concurrency control, group awareness, collaboration tasks and user roles management had been implemented. As an instance of this approach, we use the CoCADToolAgent to transform the commercial 2D CAD system-AutoCAD into a CSCD prototype system. As a special collaboration tool for CAD applications, CoCADToolAgent revealed better collaboration performance than the general collaboration toolkits, such as Microsoft Net Meeting. The approach can be extended to 3D CAD system.