A proxy approach to integrate heterogeneous CAD resources for distributed collaborative design

Collaborative product design on heterogeneous computer-aided design (CAD) platforms has shown its significance to today’s global manufacturing industries. This article proposes a novel collaboration framework for supporting distributed collaborative design with heterogeneous CAD resources. The unique feature of the framework is that, instead of directly accessing heterogeneous CAD resources, a so-called co-proxy model is defined and created to work as the replication agent representing original CAD resources during collaborative sessions. The co-proxy model is designed to represent corresponding CAD resources with both structured polygonal graphics for visualisation and a set of embedded virtual topological elements (VTE), so as to support collaborative design manipulations such as virtual assembly and annotation. Moreover, the co-proxy model comes with an external link mechanism, with which the powerful modelling and editing functionalities from heterogeneous CAD systems can be reasonably integrated into the distributed collaboration framework. The proposed framework together with its enabling technologies has been implemented into a prototype system named as Co-DMU, which is generally applicable for feature-based CAD modelling systems with automation interfaces provided.