Distributted work environments for collaborative engineering

Abstract

Extended and networked enterprises distribute the design of products, planning of the production process, and manufacturing regionally if not globally. The usual face-to-face work is going to be replaced, at least partly, if not totally, by computer mediated collaboration. Awaited are reduced problems of resolution cycle time, increasing productivity and agility, and reduced travel to remote sites, enabling more timely and effective interactions, faster design iterations, and improved resource management. Mixed reality based work environments support distributed collaborative work between remote sites. An application for solving a control task collaboratively is described. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.