Abstract

An industry survey was conducted to collect information on current collaboration methods and project management and communication structures. The results, along with other design collaboration philosophies, were used to develop a method of coordinating users in a multi-user design space. These thesis methods will regulate collaboration and avoid user collisions in the same model space, either by cooperative interaction or by spatial decomposition with regional blocking. The method partitions the design space by integrating a graphical user interface tool into the engineering application used to define and assign the necessary tasks of the project. A simple implementation of this method proved that it is usable by multiple users, is faster to setup than simple written instructions, and helps to coordinate users to work together efficiently. To enable some of the key capabilities of the method, modern Computer-Aided application (CAx) architecture would need to be revised with multiple users in mind. One constraint example would be to partition the design space geometrically with visible boundaries between user-assigned areas. Current CAx architectures have some selection filtering capability that can be based on mathematical constraint boundaries, but are not designed to globally filter selection and are not very useful in their limited form. A simple solution to working around this limitation has not been found.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Mechanical Engineering

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2011-12-12

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd4925

Keywords

decomposition, multi-user, GUI, CAD, partition, collaborative, coordination, constraints, boundaries

Language

English

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