A management strategy for distributed data in collaborative design

This paper presents a distributed data management strategy for collaborative design, which supports the data exchange pattern based on any fine-grained data as well as that based on traditional file service. Data are represented using XML and their exchange is achieved through the publishing and subscription mechanism among individual participants. It is also shown in this paper that how the data replication mechanism, which supports both synchronous and asynchronous mechanism, propagates updates among data copies to provide consistent views of data among many computers, in which the rule-based approach is used to resolve conflict. Based on this strategy, a research prototype system of collaborative design has been implemented and tested in the design of auto-body welding lines.