Real-Time Collaborative Design System for Product Assembly Over the Internet

Product assembly design is a complex activity possible involving collaboration between different designers geographically dispersed. This paper puts forward some significant methodologies and technologies for distributed assembly and presents a collaboration architecture that manages to support working in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. Meanwhile, we adopt a three-level conflicts detection scheme to avoid conflicts effectively and a data streaming technology based on C/P (command/parameter) to realize the real-time design. Based on the technologies mentioned above, a design system that supports real-time collaborative assembly is developed and we validate it by assembling a mechanical press across network collaboratively.