Name Consistency of Topological Objects in Instant Collaborative Design

Collaborative design is a method to achieve time-to-market advantages against opponents for organizations under current increasing commercial competition. Collaborative design can be achieved through geographically distributed intelligent agents for a design task. Two different types of name inconsistency problem, which are concurrency resulted and heterogeneous resulted, are identified in instant collaborative design systems. This paper proposes a solution for consistently naming the topological objects located on instant collaborative agents during the instant collaborative design procedure. The consistent naming method proposed is the footstone to guarantee correctness of the design product. A topological face sorting based method, where external normal vector (or weighted external normal vector) is employed for sorting faces, is implemented in a prototype system CHD_CPFMS.