Internet-based collaborative product design with assembly features and virtual design spaces

Typically, during product design collaborating, designers share design data and assembly models. However, due to the limited bandwidth of the Internet transfer of detailed CAD based assembly models is slow. Therefore, tools based on polygonized representations of assembly models have been utilized during collaborative design. These models are primarily used for visualization, which is an important activity during modeling. However, providing the designers with the ability to perform real-time geometric modification, assembly constraints specification and concurrent design of different components/sub-assemblies will enable designers to collaborate effectively during design. This paper presents a new geometric representation called the AREP and a prototypical system (cPAD) that uses this representation, which implements the collaboration paradigm by supporting these activities. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.