Real-time collaborative solid shape design (RCSSD) on the internet

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.