Distributed and Integrated Collaborative Engineering Design

The increasing complexity of engineering artifacts and the globalization of product development necessitates a distributed and collaborative engineering environment for design and manufacture. The DICE (Distributed and Integrated Collaborative Engineering Environment) project at MIT was one of the first attempts in developing a set of tools and techniques for a computer supported collaborative engineering environment. This book provides an in-depth description of various DICE components. Topics include: 1) The engineering process; 2) Geometric modeling, including non-manifold modeling; 3) Management of long duration design transactions; 4) Constraint management for encoding design relationships; 5) Media synchronization for collaborative work; 6) Design knowledge representation and problem solving; 7) Representation for sharing design information; 8) Design rationale evolution and conflict mitigation; 9) Organizational issues, including teams, outsourcing, and workflow; and 10) Object-oriented concepts and implementation details.