A hybrid mode collaborative design system on the Internet

The development processes of complicated products, such as aero-engines, are across time, organizations and disciplines in multiple engineering teams. CSCD (computer supported cooperative design) is one of the developing trends to support above processes. Considering the advantage of two kinds of collaborative design mode, i.e., Web-based mode and agent-based mode, This work presents a hybrid mode collaborative design system on the Internet. The paper introduces the system architecture, discusses the key technologies and points out the works on the system for the future. The system architecture is distributed and based on software agents which communicate with each other using KQML through a centralized message server. The system is composed of five modules including application collaborative tools, communication agent, service agent set, Web server and collaborative database.