Coordination for replicated collaborative feature modeling

Abstract

Collaborative feature modeling has been proposed and applied in product design for improving design quality and shortening lead-time. The coordination mechanism for scheduling the collaborative design activities has been a topic of significant research effort. Total-locking mechanism and granular locking mechanism have been reported. However, these granular locking mechanisms have some limitations. Although the designers can edit different parts of a feature model at the same time, there are some conflicts due to feature interactions. Besides, in order to maintain consistency of the replicated design models, the order of execution of the ‘feature create operations’ must be kept consistent at the client sites. In this research, a fine granular locking mechanism is proposed for a replicated collaboration system. The locking granularity is defined according to feature relationships, and the potential operation conflicts are resolved using a naming and matching mechanism. In the proposed approach, a design model can be divided into several feature portions, thus a parallel working paradigm can be achieved. The ‘feature create operation’ is processed differently from the ‘feature modify operation’ so as to maintain consistency of the order of the features created. The limitation of this approach is that the effectiveness depends on the parent–child relations of the features. The proposed coordination approach has been validated in a proof-of-concept prototype system developed based on Java and Open CASCADE.