Design and model for a computer supported cooperative environment for CASE and CAD applications

For the past decade, numerous commercial and experimental systems have been designed for collaborative writing applications. From our experience working in the area of CSCW research and development, we have come to realize the possibility and the potential significance of CSCW systems in the engineering design process. The objective of the research is to introduce and develop a CSCW environment to support engineering design, specifically, in a distributed environment that combines computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided software engineering (CASE). In an effort to combine them into a seamless engineering package, we first target supporting engineering design (using CAD) with computer simulation (using CASE). This paper addresses issues involved in the design and development of the environment, including the graphical user interface, text and graphics editors, video and audio communication, multimedia database, document integration, and software simulation.