Investigation to Peer-to-Peer-based collaborative working platform for product development

Abstract

The current globalising industry is highly desired for synchronous collaborative working environment to perform multisited and multiuser cooperation during complex product design among partners, to provide customisation-oriented service to fulfil market demands and to satisfy customer's requirement around the world. This paper introduces a preliminary research work about Peer-to-Peer (P2P)-based collaborative communication environment that attempts to support codesign 3D CAD model in synchronous Collaborative Product Design (CPD) in the way of What You See Is What I see (WYSIWIS). A prototype with communication means of document cosharing and editing, draft codrawing, instant message and VRML-based visualisation space is developed on the basis of JXTA development platform. Collaborative model modification can be performed by the cooperation between document coediting space and VRML visualisation space.