A database approach for information communication in a peer‐to‐peer collaborative CAD environment

Timely and efficient information communication is a key factor in ensuring successful collaboration in engineering collaborative design. This work proposes a database approach to support information communication between distributed and autonomous CAD systems. It provides the designer with an easy and flexible way, a project‐based propagation meta‐table, to specify what parts of a CAD information model should be communicated to other collaborating designers. A CAD peer manager, containing a peer database that stores information to be exchanged with the other collaborators, wraps each participating CAD system. The peer manager identifies changes made to the CAD model by using stored procedures and active rules in the peer database that are automatically generated based on the propagation meta‐table. The identified updates are propagated in a timely manner to other peers via inter‐database message passing, thereby minimizing the volume of necessary information to be exchanged. Furthermore, remote peer designers can flexibly incorporate, filter, or delete received updates by using a propagation control interface, which is also used to issue user's commands to download the data from the CAD system to the peer database and lookup the received messages in the peer database. The approach is applicable on any CAD system having a CORBA interface and can also be applied to other kinds of object‐oriented interfaces. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.