Computer supported collaborative design: Retrospective and perspective

Industry today requires new technologies to address increasingly complex product development and the high expectations of customers. Computer Supported Collaborative Design (CSCD) emerged in response to this requirement. With the rapid advancement of Internet and Web-based technologies, CSCD has been a very active R&D area in the past 15 years and has progressed dramatically. To achieve its full potential, more and more research and commercial CSCD systems have been recently developed. The depth and breadth of these applications and systems are far beyond the traditional definition of concurrent engineering. This paper presents a review of the R&D literature on CSCD, from the pre-CSCD technologies of the 1980s to today's state-of-the-art CSCD. Research challenges and opportunities on CSCD are also discussed and highlighted.