Concurrent engineering involves the integration of people, tools, informati
on, and processes into a responsive and efficient system. This paper addres
ses a kev requirement in distributed concurrent engineering, namely, the ab
ility for geographically dispersed and disparate parties, having heterogene
ous computing platforms, to exchange design and manufacturing data. The dev
elopment of an effective and efficient collaborative product design support
environment based on the WWW/Internet is presented. A new method that redu
ces the transmission time through the use of macro files is proposed to rea
lise the real-time communication together with a monitoring methodology for
synchronising group operations, and maintaining consistency of shared CAD
models in a cooperative design review (co-modifying) process. Based on the
proposed methods, a software interface has been developed to extend the tra
ditional single location CAD software system to a multi-location applicatio
n for coordinated product design through the Internet. This software interf
ace was coded in Java. The architecture is a connection-oriented client/ser
ver structure using TCP/IP protocol. Unigraphics on a UNIX Workstation and
MicroStation on Windows NT have been successfully integrated. The findings
of this paper allow, product designers to exchange and share product data,
communicate with team members, modify geometry data on particular aspects o
f the design, and maintain operations consistency in all the distributed co
operative sites on a wide variety of platforms.