LEVERAGING DESIGN RATIONALE TO IMPROVE COLLABORATIVE CO-DESIGN CAD ENVIRONMENTS

This paper presents a new method that improves upon the existing approaches to collaborative co-design environments. The new method uses design rationale to intelligently select what information is shared with each of the users in the design session. This represents an improvement upon the existing state of the art in co-design CAD environments. To demonstrate the viability of the method a multi-user collaborative design environment tool was created. The tool was named SimulPart and was built upon the NX CAD package. SimulPart effectively converted the single user NX CAD package into a multi-user co-design environment. Validation was then performed by benchmarking SimulPart against NX Collaborate which is a leading commercial co-design solution. The results of the benchmark showed that SimulPart is in fact a superior collaborative solution as it outperforms NX Collaborate on several key collaborative metrics. As a result of this work future efforts are encouraged into both improving upon the SimulPart architecture as well as the development of a new CAD tool from the ground up that utilizes the method presented in this paper.