Product Data Modeling for Design Collaboration

Collaborative design creates added values in the design and production process by bringing the benefits of teamwork and cooperation in a concurrent and coordinated manner. Product data modeling is one of the key techniques to the development of computer supported collaborative design systems. In this paper, the new challenges and requirements for product data modeling are analyzed in terms of supporting design collaboration firstly. Then, a state-of-the-art review of existing approaches to product data modeling is carried out and the limitations of these approaches are examined. To overcome the limitations found with existing product data modeling approaches, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM) is proposed to facilitate the management and coordination of a collaborative design process. The proposed CPDM is established by extending the popular parametric feature-based product data model and including information required for design management and coordination. The functionalities and the data elements of the main data modules in the proposed CPDM are described in detail respectively.