Collaborative assembly design

This chapter discusses the design modification issues in a collaborative assembly (co-assembly) design environment, which enables multiple geographically dispersed designers to design and assemble parts collaboratively through the Internet. An assembly representation model, a feature-based hierarchical co-assembly representation, is proposed and a new definition of the assembly feature is given to resolve the co-assembly design issues. In order to realize the design modification, a design modification propagation control mechanism is proposed. A system framework that is suitable for realizing the design modification is also proposed and developed.