Collaborative model for concurrent product design

With the demand of distributed designers to cooperatively design a single product, these designers need to simultaneously access a common database, which holds the geometric model and other information of the product. But frequently, their design will lead to invalid results. Therefore, it is very important to build a distributed model to coordinate these designers to ensure the consistency of the product. The paper introduces a collaborative model to support this concurrent work. First, the architecture of this system is presented. Then a collaborative design model is described in detail. We analyze two reasons for the conflict and give two collaborative modes to coordinate the design process. These two modes can be used in different environments and can be used in a mixed way. So we can keep the consistency of the common solid model and maintain the maximal freedom of the designers at the same time. Finally, we give some design examples to further illustrate our model