A multimedia support system for collaborative assembly design

In collaboration, multimedia information/data act as very important tools to share product design and engineering knowledge between project participants. However, current multimedia in collaboration provide only communication protocols and have limitations on capturing any engineering information imposed on product design. Hence, this paper aims to introduce a new framework of multimedia support for assembly design (AsD). The multimedia are linked to remote and distributed engineering information/data, which are core sources of AsD decision making. In doing so, rather than directly interfacing and sharing engineering information/data, the new framework will provide design participants with a seamless way of collaboration. Attributed relational graphs (ARGs) are adopted to employ an efficient representation of image contents. An extended ARG is proposed to incorporate information about assembly relationships and mathematical decision-making models with ARG-formatted graphical information. This research employs a service-oriented architecture (SOA) remotely and transparently to exchange multimedia, assembly relationships and mathematical model information for multimedia support. MSS-AD (multimedia support system for collaborative AsD), a prototype system, has been implemented to show the feasibility of the idea proposed in this paper.