A component agent based open CAD system for collaborative design

The competitive market requires rapid product development. Virtual product development is a new development mode in this network times. It is featured by its dynamic development alliance, i.e., those partners are distributed in the world. This paper presents an open-system architecture for a collaborative CAD system supporting virtual product development. The software component technology is adopted to build the system. A component is a reusable application whose data and methods are exposed, and can be accessed and operated by other applications. In this system, each building element or assembly is designed as an independent component. The component agent (CA) method is used as the basic system modules. To manage these distributed CAs, a web-based interface manager is provided. The assembly shop is a product design space based on those CAs and the interface manager. To manage the collaborative session, a web-based design session manager is proposed. This paper describes such a system architecture.