Version management in a cooperative engineering design

Cooperative engineering design requires significant communication between design teams to come up with an optimal engineering product. Design teams typically use the Internet for communication between teams. With this new level of communication possible with the Internet, there is a need for better engineering cooperation tools. One of the most important tools is a version management system that can not only maintain various design versions but also synchronizes and matches the design versions using some engineering criteria. In this paper we describe a system that maintains multi-level versions and discuss methods to synchronize and match these versions.