What is Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

In today’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) era, the need for real-time collaboration over the Internet is increasing. Due to ongoing corporate globalization and geographic dispersion of project operations, collaborative becomes a key for supporting these distributed corporate operations. Current Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools typically do not support collaborative work. In geographically dispersed environment, designers from different companies or locations are having difficulties to communicate with each other. Several studies have been done on collaborative environment. However, all studies are still in the research level and not yet commercialize. In order to support collaborative work, few concerns must be taken into the consideration. Network architecture is the main concern when designing a network based collaborative environment. Client-Server Architecture and Peer-to-Peer Architecture were two possible architecture designs that can be used for collaborative graphical based design environment.