Facilitating collaborative design through feature recognition and scripting representation

Effective product realization collaboration has emerged as the strategic approach and the foremost key for manufacturing enterprises to impel continuous product innovation and substantial process improvement to enable the right product to launch the right market in the right place at the right time. This paper is to investigate new approaches for facilitating product design collaboration with focus on the development of an agent enhanced and hybrid P2P-based collaborative network framework to support system integration, group collaboration, and collaborative data and process management; an attributed adjacency graph (AAG) based feature recognition approach from 3D CAD solid model in STEP file format to promote CAD data seamless sharing and feature-level interoperating; a procedural 3D CAD scripting language to implement real time collaborative modeling by collaborative editing 3D CAD model scripting file. Some preliminary results indicate the proposed approaches are feasible and practicable.