Collaborative model for concurrent product design

With the demand of distributed designers to cooperatively design a single product, these designers need to simultaneously access a common database, which hold the geometric model and other information of the product. But frequently, their design will lead to invalid result. So it is very important to build a distributed model to coordinate these designers to ensure the consistency of the product. This paper introduces a collaborative model to support this concurrent work. First, the architecture of this system is presented. Then a collaborative design model is described in detail. We analyze two reasons of the conflict and give two collaborative modes to coordinate the design process. These two modes can be used in different environment and can be used in a mixed way. So we can keep the consistency of the common solid model and maintain the maximal freedom of the designers at the same time. Finally, we give some design example to further illustrate our model.