Collaborative virtual prototyping of product assemblies over the Internet

Product assembly design is a complex activity involving collaboration between several designers. Currently, many manufacturing firms out source the design and development of different portions of a product to different suppliers. Due to the absence of an integrated tool for collaborative product assembly design, designers currently follow an indirect approach. This makes collaboration an unorganized and inefficient activity. This paper discusses the architectural novelties and design considerations utilized to develop an integrated collaborative assembly design tool, Further, the scenarios of using such a tool are discussed in detail. This discussion highlights how the tool contributes towards making collaboration an organized and efficient activity and enables designers to rapidly design and prototype the product assembly. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.