A distributed virtual environment for concurrent engineering

This paper presents a distributed virtual environment that supports collaboration among members of a geographically dispersed multidisciplinary team engaged in concurrent product development. The distributed virtual environment maintains a shared information space that contains product data in a standard ISO STEP compliant format. It supports a user configurable virtual environment and the integration of different CAE applications to support different engineering perspectives. The realistic manipulation of assembly models within the distributed virtual environment is supported by constraint-based 3D manipulation techniques developed at Leeds. The initial implementation of this architecture supports accurate assembly modelling and kinematic simulation for virtual prototypes and runs on a network of SGI Indy workstations over an ATM network.