Research on conflict resolution and operation consistency in real-time collaborative graphic designing system

A real-time collaborative graphic design system is a special class of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) systems. It allows a group of users to simultaneously view and design some graphics documents from geographically dispersed sites connected by computer networks. Conflict resolution and operation consistency remains one of the core issues in this type of system. This paper discusses the problem of preserving consistency operations in face of conflict, and proposes a multi-version approach to resolve it. In the approach, first operations are divided into two categories, and then a new structure is adopted to represent these operations. It keeps the consistency of operations at very low cost by increasing multiple object versions in face of conflicts. The algorithms presented in this paper have been used in the CoDesign system. The result proves this approach can improve the system performance in the real-time collaborative graphic designing system.