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Top1. Introduction
With the rapid development of computer and network technology, which provide a solid foundation for the networked application of multimedia environment (López-Fernández, et al., 2017; Zeng et al., 2007). The development and application of multimedia support environment can provide good solution for visual multi-disciplinary collaborative design activities in the field of integrated product development (Toye et al., 1994). Through constructing the multimedia collaborative environment (Anupam & Bajaj, 1994; Saddik et al., 2008), discipline experts from different fields can free to exchange design knowledge and experience, so as to eliminate design conflicts in the interaction process, solve complexity problems such as inconsistency and information asymmetry, push the product design toward the direction to get optimal solutions, and improve collaboration efficiency and quality (Zeng et al., 2008; Zhou et al., 2020).
At present, the media interaction technologies applied in the field of collaborative design have evolved from traditional special network mode to Internet-based mode, solutions have developed from hardware-based to software-based, and the streaming media technology has also been used to develop related system functions. The investment costs of software and hardware of video conference system are relatively high in the commercial market. These restrict their application and rapid deployment in the multi-disciplinary collaborative design environment. It is difficult to integrate with the system platform of product data management (PDM) or product life cycle management (PLM) used in product development process. The main goal of this paper is to build multimedia support environment that is suitable for multi-disciplinary collaborative design, to realize a lightweight application system with low-cost and cross-platform advantages under the integrated product development environment, which makes the deployment of visual cooperation environment more convenient and flexible in the PDM system for product design process. Different from the development of traditional network conference system (Mat Kiah et al., 2014; Li, 2011; Han & Kim, 2014; Oliveira et al., 2003; Yang et al., 2016; Jang et al., 2016; Petrangeli et al., 2019), the research of this article focuses on:
- 1)
Constructing a multimedia supported environment adapted to application background of multi-disciplinary collaborative product design and specific requirements, and to realize real-time collaborative interaction under the group cooperation mode.
- 2)
Establishing a virtual space for discipline experts to exchange knowledge and design intents in the collaborative product design process, including system architecture design, development plan, functional modules, data management and interaction control mechanisms.
- 3)
Implementing visual control and session management based on the Java media framework (JMF) for collaborative interaction process, related data services and integration with a PDM system.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces related research works. Section 3 presents related multimedia application technologies. Section 4 describes the requirement analysis of multimedia network construction under the product collaborative design environment. Section 5 describes the system construction of the multimedia cooperative environment. Section 6 presents the security design of the developed system usage. Section 7 presents the implementation of the multimedia system environment, experiments and integration with a PDM system. Finally, the author summarizes related work and discusses some possible future work in Section 8.