A State of the Art of Collaborative CAD Solutions

Despite the ever-growing need for speed in conception, computer-aided design (CAD) has stayed confined to the PLM paradigm, which lets only a single user at a time access and modify a CAD document. A new type of CAD, called collaborative CAD, has emerged to overcome this conundrum. Tasks can be parallelized with much more ease when multiple users can access a document simultaneously. Two main currents exist in collaborative CAD. The first one is synchronous work, which involves multiple users working in the same document simultaneously. The second one is asynchronous work, which involves each user working in a copy of the document and then all users’ work being merged at the end. In this paper, the workflows of PLM-based CAD and collaborative CAD are compared with a concrete example, the capabilities and limitations of current collaborative CAD solutions are identified and analyzed, and future perspectives regarding this work are presented.