An operation-based exchange mechanism in heterogeneous CAD collaboration

This paper presents an operation-based exchange mechanism for interoperability in heterogeneous CAD collaboration. The mechanism different from STEP-based exchange mechanism facilitates the engineers to exchange design information in distributed environment with shared semantic operations instead of model data, and to synchronously or asynchronously reconstruct the design process by executing the semantic operations in native CAD system. The proposed architecture based on this mechanism is developed to integrate traditional CAD systems and multimedia tools, and to provide essential collaborative support functions. The operation-based collaborative design system is applicable to many interactive design activities such as remote design review and online collaborative design.