Development of an expanded task management system in web-based collaborative design environment

Along with the development of advanced design methods, design resources become more tremendous than ever. At the same time, some design methods themselves are too complex to manage. In this paper, a web-based system is developed to support collaborative design by controlling design activities. Via decomposition, a project can be reassembled as dendriform structure. The activities become branches of the task tree and their correlative resources are leaves. Compared with common systems, it provides two types of constraints in order to customize better executive sequence of the tasks. The other function is that it could support heterogeneous systems by its Data Transformation Module.