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In this study, a real-time collaborative 3D assembling system (Co-assembler) has been described that allows casual customers to interactively and virtually configure the 3D products over the Internet. It provides a framework for a web-based 3D assembly system that uses a customizable product model to significantly simplify the configuration and the assembly process, and a customer-driven recommendation helper to assist the customers make their design decisions. Two assembly-specific data formats - Assembly ML and Parametric Product ML are developed for archival and data transfer. The system aims to capture the customers’ needs and convert them into technical specifications, indirectly helping to promote e-commerce for manufacturing enterprises.

Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) provides a systematic approach for user communities to model and exchange data on specific types of products and manufacturing technologies. With the increasing popularity of the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) on the Internet, mapping STEP data into XML seems a logical way to make STEP data more accessible through the Internet. On the other hand, Internet-based information systems generally consist of data sources and clients that access the data sources; and mediators have been proposed as a middle layer that provides added value by converting the basic data into information required by the clients. To work effectively, mediators require machine-readable data models and standardized interfaces, which can be developed based on XML. In this paper we discuss the ways of automated conversion from STEP into XML, and the exchange of STEP data through the XML-based mediator architecture.

The Internet and the World-Wide Web created a new infrastructure and new possibilities for concurrent engineering. In order to support real-time (synchronous) collaborative solid shape design, however, some major issues still have to be resolved. These involved deployment of solid modeling software on the Web, shared access to common solid models, communication and control of the design actions among designers, and efficient representation of the many different but related design versions of the product. This paper discusses the development of a real-time collaborative solid modeling system that addresses these issues. The prototype system has been implemented in a client-server environment in Java, using the Java Remote Method Invocation package for networking support.

This paper discusses the synchronous viewing and editing of object-oriented models based on the Unified Modeling Lan guage (UML) by multiple users on the internet. Each user works on a copy of the model, which is continuously synchronized with the master copy on a central server. A group of users can work together in the common single writer-multiple reader mode, controlled by a token that can be passed from user to user. Alternatively, different users can lock different parts of the model for exclusive editing while the changes are visible to all other users. One can improve on basic granular locking by considering the semantics of the graphical nota tion. A semantics-based locking mechanism has been designed and implemented for UML class diagrams in order to allow users to col laborate more effectively: A prototype collaborative UML (CUML) editing system has been implemented in Java to validate the design.