Design and Implementation of Synchronized Collaborative System upon Heterogeneous CAD Systems

Abstract

The synchronized collaborative design within heterogeneous CAD systems becomes a significant challenge because of the great difference in the modeling operations and underground data structures between different CAD systems. This paper first proposes a collaborative architecture with heterogeneous CAD systems, which is composed of CADAdapter component and CoCADMiddleware component. The CADAdapter is responsible of capturing of local operation commands and replaying of remote operations, and the CoCADMiddleware takes charge of operation translation of operation commands between different CAD systems. In order to accomplish the translation of system modeling command (SMC) between different CAD systems, a description of neutral modeling command (NMC) is presented to represent these neutral operation commands. By means of this representation the transformation algorithms of operation commands from different CAD systems, SMC-to-NMC module and NMC-to-SMC module, arepresented. The design and implementation of a prototype of synchronized collaborative design system is discussed based on two common CAD systems UG NX3.0 and SolidWorks 2004 with their APIs and VC++.