Web-based Collaborative Design With Parametric Feature Modeling And Modifying

With the rapid development of computer network and globalization of product development, traditional CAD design is undergoing a great revolution. A new product design mode, collaborative design, began to rise from the 1990's. Especially the Web-based collaborative design is becoming the focus of the collaborative design research since the client is zero-installed, easy to maintain and convenient to use. Some key issues in the Web-based collaborative design are studied in this thesis.Based on the analysis of the functional requirements of the Web-based collaborative design, a framework of collaborative design is proposed firstly with the functionalities of parametric feature modeling and modifying at the clients. In this framework, with the support of powerful modeling software in the server, the designers at the clients can view, annotate and carry out some other complex interactive operations on the model only through the browser.Secondly, the function of feature editing in the client is proposed for the collaborative design system which includes feature modification and feature construction. Feature modification is to associate the information of features obtained from the feature model in the server with the facet model in client, so the user can change the model by modifying the parameters of the feature. Feature construction is that the new feature can be defined by the designers at the clients interactively. And then the parameters are transmitted to the server. And feature creation operation is conducted really on the server. Finally the result model is transmitted to the clients which will update the models.In order to support the real-time feature editing in the client during the process of collaborative design, incremental transmission of the models is adopted in this study. According to this method, the model before one operation and after the operation is compared by the server to obtain the incremental model that is transmitted to the clients. The incremental model is parsed on each client and integrated into the original model. By this way, the model in the client keeps consistent with the model in theserver.Finally, a prototype system of Web-based collaborative design with parametric feature modeling and modifying is implemented. Firstly some functional modules are introduced and then some examples are given to validate the function of the system and the effectiveness of the incremental transmission algorithm.