An Approach of Virtual Prototyping Modeling in Collaborative Product Design

Abstract

The goal of virtual prototyping is to decrease the time and costs in product development and to increase quality and flexibility by providing continuous computer support for the development cycle. This paper investigates and summarizes the existing efforts on collaborative virtual prototyping and digit product modeling. To overcome the weaknesses in the existing work, this study introduces a theory of directed acyclic graph (DAG) and gives definitions to the related concepts, and then provides a modeling method of virtual prototyping based on DAG. In particular, the concepts about this method, such as scene, entity, scene graph, linear scene graph, nonlinear scene graph, are explicitly defined. Following these definitions, the principle and method with regards to building the virtual prototyping for collaborative design are explained through an example. In the end, the paper concludes with the features of the modeling method of virtual prototyping based on DAG. This method benefits that 3D objects from different applications can be joined into one shared scene that can be viewed, manipulated in independent or shared camera positions by different users, thus facilitating collaborative virtual prototyping for remote distributed design.