A pear-to-pear collaborative product design platform for dispersed network manufacturing

The network technology is changing our working and living greatly. Many multi-national companies cooperate in geographically different locations. They need to communicate and work concurrently on large amount of complex product data with their factories, sub-contractors as well as suppliers across the border. The use of e-mail and fax are far from satisfactory as they are time consuming and ineffective. In this paper, a pear-to-pear collaborative product design platform (CPDP) is proposed which enables authorised users in geographically different locations to cooperate and share private resources, such as collaborative design product drawing files, sharing personal knowledge or data. The system is web-based, there is no need for the users to install any utility software at their ends since the cooperation is based thin client technology and a pear-to-pear screen sharing technique. This results in substantial saving in the cost and the product development time in a network environment.