Establishment of distributed design environment

With the competition in the global marketplace, to develop a successful product requires geographically located designers to build and test solutions collaboratively in a distributed infrastructure. In this paper, a client/server environment based on 3D feature-based modelling and Java technologies is developed to enable information generated by a design team to be provided efficiently for each member within the team regardless of where the member is located. In this environment, design tasks and clients are organized through sessions generated and maintained by a collaborative server. The information from an individual client during a design process is updated and broadcast to other clients in a working session through an event-driven and callback mechanism. The environment is open, and downstream manufacturing analysis modules can be wrapped as services and plugged into the environment to support the design activities. At the server side, a feature-feature relationship is established and maintained to filter the varied information of a working part during the design process, so as to facilitate efficient information update in the environment.