A Distributed Environment for Collaborative Design

Tools and applications are needed to provide engineers with support to design in a distributed and collaborative environment. These systems and tools need to make it possible to share design information, and schedule design process so that a group of distributed engineers can work together. Software level design is the prerequisite condition for applying any design approaches into the distributed mechanical design and in this paper, basic design systems and design tools are developed so that a typical distributed mechanical design can be supported. Requirements for a collaborative design system are presented, along with requirements to develop a prototype distributed system. The system is demonstrated on reverse engineering project for an aircraft component.