Exploring a P2P Based Collaborative Feature Modeling through a Procedural 3D CAD Language

Real time collaborative feature-based CAD modeling within geographically dispersed participants is one of the current research hot spots in collaborative design community. Most existing collaborative design prototypes are based on C/S network architecture which has some weaknesses, such as a single point of failure and bottleneck, low expansibility and higher maintenance costs. This paper proposed a more effective and efficient scheme of real time collaborative parametric feature-based CAD modeling through concurrently programming 3D CAD model macro file with a procedural 3D CAD scripting language within a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) based collaborative editing system of our PRC platform, developed on the top of an improved JXTA. This paper describes the hybrid P2P network infrastructure, the procedural 3D CAD language, and a hierarchical, dynamic locking approach for consistent maintenance in P2P based collaborative editing. The rudimentarily developed prototype has verified that the proposed scheme is feasible.