An Approach to Supporting Synchronized Collaborative Design Within Heterogeneous CAD Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to building up a synchronized collaborative design platform upon heterogeneous CAD systems. In the approach, Neutral Modeling Commands are used to achieve the real-time exchange of modeling operations between heterogeneous CAD systems. For the Neutral Modeling Commands, an object oriented representation is given and employed to support the translation between System Modeling Operations (SMO) and Neutral Modeling Commands (NMC). Moreover, two kinds of translators, SMO-to-NMC and NMC-to-SMO, are established, which can deal with modification/deletion operations and composite features and user-defined features besides common creation operations. The preliminary test results show that the proposed approach is promising.