On sharing of objects in concurrent design

Sharing data is an important aspect in distributed design environments and should be supported by an underlying system. Any synchronous access to data is conflict prone. Applying concurrency control and two phase commit are an option to be considered. But design processes also demand cooperation between the designers. Negotiation about actions on the product under design and the early exchange of preliminary results are crucial issues. Controlled data access by itself doesn't fulfil all the needs for cooperation. We present a new approach that relies on a concept and system model which integrates concurrent activities by a common information space offering flexible protocols for cooperation on the shared objects. We describe the customizability of the protocols to allow the approach to be adapted to different cooperative scenarios.