| With the advent of Internet and distributed computing technologies, design and manufacturing activities are increasingly more distributed and therefore new paradigms are required to produce quality products faster and cheaper. Collaborative product design on several heterogeneous computer aided design (CAD) platforms is becoming a common practice in today's global manufacturing industry.This paper proposes a novel proxy approach to support such distributed collaborative design activities as virtual assembly, annotation specification, and design evaluation. It features a novel replicated proxy model, named as co-proxy model, which is lightweight and of unified XML format. The proposed co-proxy model not only graphically represents the corresponding CAD model on the local client machine, but also contains embedded information, named as virtual topological elements (VTE). The embedded VTE objects provide necessary topological information for co-proxy models to support precise geometric interactions. Part and assembly models constructed on different CAD platforms can be synthesized into this model maintaining corresponding relations to the original CAD data resources at topological element levels. A persistent link mechanism is designed as the underlying technology to manage an external association between co-proxy models and their corresponding CAD data resources, by which the data synchronization between two models can be achieved.With the proposed approach, the replicated co-proxy model is accessible and can be manipulated over a distributed environment.More importantly, based on the proposed a collaborative platform prototype, namely Digital Mockup (DMU), is designed and developed to demonstrate the approach in support of CAD data integration from heterogeneous data resources. A case study of virtual assembly and design evaluation with heterogeneous CAD resources, namely Autodesk Inventor? and Solidworks?, has demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach. |
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