A heterogeneous collaborative design environment with dynamic management features

This paper presents a distributed application for collaborative design that aims to create a hybrid architecture combining a peer-to-peer model with server-centralised structure for efficient interoperation between the integrated heterogeneous applications and their convenient administration. In this research, the CORBA (common object request broker architecture) is utilised as an implementation tool, the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is used as a common data descriptive language and the DXF (Data Exchange File) is chosen for the graphical file format. In this paper, the architecture is introduced first, and then the encapsulating issues is presented for existing applications and management services, followed by an example of gear design to illustrate the methods and procedure developed by this research.