A web-enabled engineering object modeling environment to support interoperability and intelligent services in collaborative design

Design collaboration is recognized as an effective approach in joint problem solving to achieve success of product development in distributed and heterogeneous environments. Design collaboration involves communication of design information, coordination of design activities, and negotiation of design conflicts between multi-disciplinary teams. To support these critical requirements in collaborative design, methodologies and software systems are needed. This paper shares our experience in the method and software development for a Web-enabled engineering object modeling environment. It presents our methods for interoperable and extensible design information modeling, for intelligent object behaviors embedment in CAD models, and for design information sharing across product lifecycle applications through a common vocabulary. The prototype implementation of the modeling environment provides standardized and localized engineering objects embedded with design semantics and intelligent behaviors for the information needs from multiple engineering software applications. The prototype also provides activity coordination and negotiation facilities through team setting, online visualization, live updating, conflict management, and messaging. Use scenarios are discussed in the paper.