A PDM-Based VE-Oriented Infrastructure for Distributed Collaborative Design

This paper presents a Product Data Management (PDM) based infrastructure with a coordination agent for distributed collaborative design. The proposed approach exploits applications and resources from PDM systems as well as web platforms, and provides a solution for both heterogeneous PDM systems integration and VE-oriented collaborative product development. The proposed coordination agent (CA) helps ensure the data consistency and secure collaboration among remote sites. Such an approach shows some advantages over the peer-peer interaction in feasibility, efficiency and reconfigurability. Because of the introduction of CA, the resulting collaborative workspaces are prospective to be further developed to interact with other agent-oriented systems for VE.