Survey on Distributed Collaborative Engineering and Applications

Nowadays, product design and manufacturing industries have shown increasingly strong requirements of using new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to address more complex collaborative product development processes and higher expectation of customers dispersed globally. A new research area called Distributed Collaborative Engineering (DCE) has emerged in recent years in response to the aforementioned trend. Based on the rapid advancement of ICT, such as Internet, Web and Cloud Computing, DCE has become one of the most active and emerging R&D areas in the past two decades facilitating product design and realization processes, with a bid to support relevant teams to carry out distributed collaborative work effectively. DCE has progressed dramatically, and more and more research and engineering systems have been developed in order to achieve the full potential of DCE for various industrial applications. Rooted from Concurrent Engineering or Simultaneous Engineering, DCE has been expended in terms of depth and width, and relevant research and engineering systems are now far beyond traditional definitions and working scopes. This chapter presents a review of the R&D literature in the area, from the developed technologies of the 1980s to today’s state-of-the-art. Research challenges and opportunities are also discussed and highlighted in the end.