A generic entity-centric concurrent manipulation control scheme for cooperative design

Concurrent manipulation control scheme is an important problem for cooperative design. Consistency, responsiveness and concurrency are three important while opposite requirements for concurrent manipulation control. Furthermore, the essence of concurrent manipulation control is to solve manipulation confliction and provide confliction-free manipulation. Hence, the focus of concurrent manipulation control scheme is how to solve manipulation confliction with minimum response time and maximum concurrency under consistency. This paper proposed several design considerations for concurrent manipulation control scheme. Based on these considerations, this paper presented a new entity-centric concurrent manipulation scheme based on a series of formalized concepts. This new scheme implements relax WYSIWIS, and adopts confliction elimination rather than confliction avoidance. The new scheme is divided into three steps: local manipulation, server-side manipulation validation and replica synchronization. Local manipulation improves responsiveness; server-side manipulation validation maximizes concurrency; and replica synchronization guarantees consistency. Moreover, an overall implementation for the new entity-centric concurrent manipulation control scheme is depicted in details.