Cooperative design, visualization, and engineering

As the complexity of design, visualization and engineering increases rapidly, single-user’s e?ort is no longer enough to accomplishever-growingrequirements. Group e?ort becomes essential. There are many industrial areas that demand strong CDVE support such as mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, architecture design, engineering and building construction (AEC), etc. There are numerousother application areaswhere cooperativeand concurrent working is becoming popular, such as entertainment program development, networked gaming, simulation, collaborative learning, etc. Successful cooperative design, visualization and engineering highly depend on the advances in fundamental research areas such as concurrent proce- ing, middleware, agent-based methods, design patterns, distributed systems, databases, transport protocols in network communication, human machine - teraction, group behavior ..., just to name a few. There is a very tight re- tionship between cooperative design, visualization and engineering. Cooperative design will become impossible without cooperative visualization while coop- ative engineering processes would not be complete without cooperative design and visualization. From my research experience in the ?eld since 1996 in the Spanish National R & D Project CICYT TEL 96-0544, 3D Cooperative Design System (Sistemas Cooperativos de Diseo en 3D), up to the European Esprit (IST) Project No.