State-of-the-art technologies and methodologies for collaborative product development systems

In order to facilitate product realisation processes, presently, research is actively being carried out to develop methodologies and technologies to support geographically dispersed teams to organise collaborative design based on the quickly evolving information technologies. A number of research works and commercial systems have appeared to provide solutions for collaborative and distributed product development, and the practical applications are getting more pervasive and mature. In this paper, the recently related works are summarised from three aspects - visualisation-based collaborative systems, co-design collaborative systems and CE ( concurrent engineering)- based collaborative systems. Around these aspects, about 100 papers and 30 commercial systems/ international standards published or launched recently are discussed. The current research and development statuses and issues, underlying algorithms, mechanisms and system architectures, and the future trends and challenges are explained and compared in detail.