Collaborative feature modeling
Assistant professor - Rafael Bidarra |
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Collaborative Modeling Systems are distributed, multiple-user systems that provide a team of geographically dispersed designers with the appropriate modeling tools for working together, concurrently and synchronously, on the design of a product. Such tools are especially helpful in current multi-disciplinary design teams, where different members have dissimilar views of the product according to their life-cycle activity (e.g., design, manufacturing planning, assembly planning, inspection planning). Effectively improving the collaboration within such teams can significantly reduce product cost and time to market. We believe that a multiple-view feature modeling system is the ideal basis for a collaborative modeling system.
Our research in collaborative feature modeling is currently focused, among other things, on the following crucial issues:
- concurrency, which deals with the problems of simultaneous access and manipulation of model data by different users;
- synchronization, which deals with the propagation of evolving data among system users, in order to keep their model data consistent;
- interactivity, which deals with visualization and user interaction facilities, aimed at guaranteeing an effective collaboration among system users.
Techniques being investigated within this project are implemented and tested in the collaborative feature modeling prototype system webSPIFF. This system presents a web-based client-server approach, where the server coordinates the collaborative session, maintains the shared model, and provides all functionality that cannot, or should not, be implemented on the client. The clients perform operations locally as much as possible, and only high-level semantic messages, as well as a limited amount of information necessary for updating the client data, will be sent over the network. A demo version of webSPIFF is available online at www.webSPIFF.org for all users interested in experimenting with it.