A DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR COLLABORATIVE ENGINEERING

This article details research to develop a distributed collaborative e ngineering environment (DCEE) system that will allow members of a geog raphically dispersed multidisciplinary team to collaborate during prod uct development. This article addresses the problems of integrating th e information that is generated during product development (product da ta) with a distributed virtual environment, and the problems of suppor ting multidisciplinary teams in the development process. The DCEE is a n enhanced distributed virtual environment with a rich set of engineer ing applications and information as it provides an architecture and en gineering tools that allow the direct sharing of standard product data among the users with immediate propagation of any changes. Each user has a local environment that can be configured with the tools and data that each specialist requires in the product development lifecycle. A n implementation of the architecture has been built to demonstrate thi s approach, and its performance has also been evaluated.