Collaborative design: Improving efficiency by concurrent execution of Boolean tasks

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications provide design and engineering professionals with various computer-based tools to perform design activities. As efficiency is one of the most important requirements in most design tasks, in this article, we contribute a novel collaborative design approach to improving efficiency, where a complex design task can be divided and executed concurrently by multiple collaborative designers. This approach is particularly effective for design tasks where Boolean operations – widely supported by most CAD applications – are heavily used in design activities, such as architecture design, mechanical design and digital media design. We have designed and implemented a prototype system CoAutoCAD to test the approach and to demonstrate a variety of collaborative design activities.