A concurrent engineering model based on automatic collaboration

Deficiency has been found in the current collaborative design systems. It is difficult and inconvenient to co-design on a Web CAD tool. New products to be designed are more and more complicated, and new requirements are advanced that automatic processes need to be used in collaborative design. A new concurrent engineering (CE) model based on automatic collaboration is presented in this paper. Scheduling tasks among the collaborative team members properly and efficiently was regarded as the essence of collaboration. A task scheduling model and the algorithm method are presented. Dynamic collaborative teams and automatic resources synchronization are the other two important parts in the new collaboration framework. As the tasks have been scheduled optimally, dynamic teams and synchronization could be realized accordingly. As a case, a collaborative system implemented with VC+ + .NET and Pro/Engineer is showed. Intelligent means such as automatic transferring, intelligent confliction solving, design details collecting are embedded into the prototype system.