A preliminary study on synchronized collaborative design based on heterogeneous CAD systems

This paper introduces a preliminary research work of synchronized collaborative design based on heterogeneous CAD systems. By analyzing several typical CAD systems, we set up a number of neutral commands corresponding to the basic modeling operations of CAD systems. Based on the neutral commands, communication between heterogeneous CAD systems is achieved. Furthermore, synchronized collaborative design is realized by real-time capturing and transferring of modeling operations between distributed heterogeneous CAD systems. A prototype of synchronized collaborative design is developed based on two common CAD svstems MDT and SOLIDWORKS with their APIs and VC++. The preliminary test results show the proposed approach promising.