Collaborative Engineering in Heterogenous Network Environments

The need for a computer supported collaborative engineering environment to stay competitive has never been greater. There are two major technical challenges in computer supported group work: the communication infrastructure and the collaborative applications. The communication infrastrukture has to scale to meet bandwidth requirements and quality-of-service requirements. The applications have to enable the product development team to share, discuss and realize ideas. In this paper we show some of the applications needed to establish cooperative work. We discuss the necessary communication technology and the related problems. Finally, we present a design application facilitating distributed, simultaneous design on a common model by different users.