A framework for real-time collaborative engineering in the automotive industries

Today, many different companies are involved in the automotive engineering process. The OEM, subcontractors and suppliers all need to collaborate and access the same data. Specialized applications are used in the process of designing vehicle electrical systems. These applications use proprietary data formats and do not support collaborative engineering. Thus collaboration methods are limited to turn-taking, split-combine and copy-merge. To become application independent and stay future-proof, a new trend is the transformation of data from the proprietary data formats to the Extensible Markup Language(1) (XML). This will allow new ways of viewing, editing and analyzing the data using new and existing applications and tools that use XML as a data model. This paper presents a novel software framework that allows easy enhancement of any such applications with the ability of collaborative real-time editing. Support for heterogeneous applications, a new flexible plug-in architecture and easy application integration are some of its key features.