An ASP-based Distributed Collaborative Design System

Collaborative design is the most important task of all activities at the lifecycle of product development under Networked Manufacturing (NM) environment. Application Service Provider (ASP) is a practical service style of informationization and ASP-based system is a effective approach to NM platforms. In this paper, combined industrial requirements with our efforts in some research projects funded by Hi-Tech R&D Program of China and Beijing Municipal Sci-Tech Program, an ASP-based distributed collaborative design system namely Co-Design is proposed to support remote collaboration among enterprises. Architecture of the system is presented and some key techniques of collaborative design are researched. Now the proposed Co-Design system has been implemented and used as ASP tools to help several small and medium enterprises to accelerate their product development and typical application examples shows that substantial benefits can be achieved by reducing of collaboration expenditure, development cost and shortening time to market.