A Study on the Distributed Collaborative Architectural Design System

Abstract

The computing resources of an organization or project team were often spread across many different platforms and in different locations. Recently, there has been a growing interest in distributed CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design) integration due to the needs of direct collaboration among project participants. The potential for the integration of information is expected to have a tremendous impact on architecture and the construction industry. The aim of this research is to provide a new paradigm for a CAAD system by combining research on integrated CAAD applications with recent collaboration technologies. To accomplish this research objective, the proposed system has been designed and a prototype implemented to produce enough guidelines to foster interest in the development of future CAAD systems on the Internet. To this end, two different scopes of implementation are evaluated: first, global architecture and the functionality of a distributed CAAD system; and, second, the association of an architectural application to the system. © 2006, Architectural Institute of Japan. All rights reserved.