Model compression and transmission in collaborative CAD

CAD systems increasingly require distributed collaborative design capabilities to meet the designers at different geographical locations to co-develop parts. It involves transmitting the CAD models back and forth among the systems in a distributed design environment. However, it is very difficult to apply because the CAD models are always very complex and the current network bandwidth is limited. In this paper, some important work about the compression and transmission of CAD models through the network is elaborated. Meanwhile, because a feature-based model always contains many extruded and revolved features, then we propose a new approach to transmission of feature-based models to deal with these extruded and revolved features. This approach can effectively cut down the transmission delay of the feature-based models, especially when the model contains many extruded and revolved features.