Abstract
Due to the economics globalization, most companies now enhance their core competences by outsourcing less-competitive tasks. As a result, the team members of modern new product development are nowadays dispersed in different geographic locations. Collaborative design is considered an effective means to facilitate such distributed product development. This research investigates 3D product information sharing in network-based collaborative design. A novel 3D streaming technology is proposed to overcome the inefficiency of data sharing, lack of support in engineering design, low data interoperability, and no peer-to-peer product information exchange, which the current information technologies cannot provide. The main idea is to record 3D product model according to multiple levels of details and to control design content based on collaboration roles. Geometric data is processed with respect to the switch face(s) of individual design features. The receiver side can progressively obtain the data and render it in real-time, without the need of implementing complex CAD operations. A complete 3D model is decomposed into a series of data packets based on the design features grouped in user-specified LOD’s. Only the data packets that the receiver does not possess need to be transferred at each model transmission, thus reducing the data amount and improving the efficiency in the streaming process. The model decomposition also provides a working mechanism for automatic data recovery in network disconnection. Prototyping software systems are implemented to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed streaming technology. Two types of system structure “client-server” and “peer-to-peer” have been realized in the implementation. Finally, two application scenarios are realized to demonstrate the practicality on actual distributed collaborative design through optimization of: “one product model disseminated to all the collaborators” and “receipt of one product model concurrently from multiple collaborators”. The result shows that this work can significantly enhance the efficiency, security, and practicality in sharing of 3D product model in networked environment.