Collaborative engineering across distributed environments characterizes today’s product development practices due to industry trends and info-communications advances. This takes place as ad-hoc fragmented value chains that increasingly require distributed collaborative design amongst companies seeking to conduct early joint design activities to cooperatively develop products to remain competitive. Distributed environments are technically ad-hoc networks on the Internet. To enable distributed collaborative design, there are specific needs for various middleware mechanisms and capabilities to appropriately distribute functionality and data across the network amidst a heterogeneous and challenging hardware and software computing landscape. These needs are related to the fundamental problem of concurrency and synchronization in design collaboration that should be handled at various system and support levels. This paper addresses one aspect of the design synchronization problem in the context of digital product modeling and associated design changes in the form of shape editing can be supported across a network of users in a timely manner. In particular, leveraging the geometric or model compression technique is presented for effective visualization and interaction. The approach proposed is relevant and complementary with research trends in product and semantic feature modeling in the distributed design context.

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ABSTRACT Internet based product information sharing and visualization is the foundation for collaborative product design and manufacturing. This paper presents a Web based framework with a STEP based product data master model and VRML based visualization techniques for visualizing and sharing product information among designers, production engineers and managers, purchasing and marketing staff, suppliers, and customers. A prototype software environment is implemented to validate the proposed framework and related technologies.

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Abstract- Worm gear design to professional standards normally involves the cooperation amongst the experts from multiple disciplines such as geometrical design, stress analysis, material selection, manufacturing, vibration simulation, etc. These experts might be in different organizations, located in different geographical regions and utilize different software tools and applications, which might be written in different languages, ported on different platforms and linked to different networks. In order to construct a collaborative environment for integrated worm gearing design, heterogeneity of these resources has to be taken into consideration. This paper presents a collaborative system for integrated worm gearing design based on CORBA distributed computing technology. All the software-based design applications and tools can be integrated together and communicated with each other, regardless of languages and platforms. This makes it easy to develop the complex distributed system using multiple programs and to construct an integrated collaborative design environment for implementing complex design tasks.

Rapid changes and discontinuities in business environment willchallenge enterprises. Tochallenge sustainable growth, companies have to find out new business solutions. There willbe needed knowledge and value innovations by networks of companies to create these solutions. Thereis urgent need to increase productivity of the knowledge work. New tools, methods and environments are needed to challenge traditional project work in multiple projects. The quality of the human interactions is taking a vital role in successful projects. Rapid changes and discontinuities in business environment will challenge enterprises. Companies have to find out new business solutions to be able gain sustainable growth. Knowledge and value innovations by networks of companies will be needed to create these solutions. There is urgent need to increase productivity of the knowledge work. Newtools and new environments are needed to challenge traditional project work in multiple projects. The quality of the human interactions is taking a vital role in successful projects. A new environment for project work, mWork and netWork is introduced in this article. netWork Oasis is an environment, which supports companies in multiple project management by offering an innovation environment metaphora. It will help people in running and participating in multiple projects linked to each others. It willoffer both the real working spaces with state ofthe art equipment and the virtual project management tools with professional facilitation services. netWork Oasis is highlighting the importance of high quality interactions and the guiding principle forthe planning of Oasis has been, how to increase the random meetings of very diverse groups of people. Tofulfil its potential and to be highly successful network Oasis has to become the meeting zone for Art, Science and Business.

Dedicated to my son, Jerry Sun, my wife, Shuo Yang, and my mother, Yufu Tang. This accomplishment would not have been possible without the constant support and encouragement of my wife and mother. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Kurt Gramoll, for providing timely support and guidance through my Ph.D. program. I also wish to thank the members of my advisory committee, Dr. Harold Stalford, Dr. Kuang-Hua Chang, Dr. David Sabatini, and Dr. Zahed Siddique, for invaluable advice and friendly support. I wish to thank all of the folks in the Sooner City project, Dr. Randall Kolar, Dr.

Rapid changes and discontinuities in business environment will challenge enterprises. To challenge sustainable growth, companies have to find out new business solutions. There will be needed knowledge and value innovations by networks of companies to create these solutions. There is urgent need to increase productivity of the knowledge work. New tools, methods and environments are needed to challenge traditional project work in multiple projects. The quality of the human interactions is taking a vital role in successful projects. Rapid changes and discontinuities in business environment will challenge enterprises. Companies have to find out new business solutions to be able gain sustainable growth. Knowledge and value innovations by networks of companies will be needed to create these solutions. There is urgent need to increase productivity of the knowledge work. New tools and new environments are needed to challenge traditional project work in multiple projects. The quality of the human interactions is taking a vital role in successful projects. A new environment for project work, mWork and netWork is introduced in this article. netWork Oasis is an environment, which supports companies in multiple project management by offering an innovation environment.metaphora. It will help people in running and participating in multiple projects linked to each other’s.others. It will offer both the real working spaces with state of the art equipment and the virtual project management tools with professional facilitation services. netWork Oasis is highlighting the importance of high quality interactions and the guiding principle for the planning of Oasis has been, how to increase the random meetings of very diverse groups of people. To fulfil its potential and to be highly successful network Oasis has to become the meeting zone for

The use of computing and mobile communications technologies in road vehicles has attracted the interest of hardware and software vendors [IBM & Motorola], [Sun Microsystems] as well as system solution providers. These “so-called ” In-Vehicle Telematics Systems have the potential to open up new market segments [NEWSBYTES] and will result in systems that: improve the quality of life for the consumer, assist the Police, Fire and Health-care emergency services and generally make road travel safer and more pleasurable. In-vehicle telematics systems tend to be ‘component-based ’ systems and consist of a collection of ‘off-the-shelf ’ components, which are inter-connected and configured to fulfil the system’s requirements. The modelling, design and implementation of these systems draws upon expertise from several different disciplines, such as: computing, telecommunications, electronics, mechatronics and human factors. With these attributes in mind, the development of IVTS calls for an approach, which combines formalized system’s modelling together with techniques to visualize different physical design configurations so that they may be compared and contrasted. In this paper, we describe an approach, which is based on combining the semi-formal Unified Modelling Language (UML) together with a graphics-based IDE, which was developed from the FRETSET project [FRETSET] and facilitates the physical layout and design configuration of in-vehicle telematics systems. The approach is demonstrated using an industrial case-study involving the development of a system for a fleet haulage company. 1.