Development of a distributed collaborative design framework within peer-to-peer environment

Distributed collaborative design and manufacture enables manufacturing organizations to maintain competitiveness in the fiercely competitive global industry. This requires that the distributed system not only maintains data consistency across globally-distributed locations seamlessly, but also allows team members to access the storage system and computing resources transparently and securely. Current grid applications mainly based on client-server architecture are inflexible and rigid for fast changing collaborations among manufacturers, especially for small and medium enterprises. In this paper, a distributed collaborative design framework is presented with a hybrid of grid and peer-to-peer technology. In order to access computational resources for design, analysis and process simulation, a meta-scheduler is designed and implemented. It helps in resource discovery and optimal utilization of resources. A test bed is established, based on the framework proposed to demonstrate a distributed collaborative design and manufacturing environment. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.