Capturing geometry rationale for collaborative design

When an artifact is designed, the typical output consists of documents describing the final result of a long series of deliberations and tradeoffs by the participants of collaborative design (a.k.a. concurrent engineering) teams. The underlying intent and logical support (i.e. the rationale) for the decisions captured therein is usually lost, or is represented at best as a scattered, difficult-to-access collection of paper documents and designers' recollections. This is particularly true for a geometric, as opposed to a preliminary, design rationale. Rationale information is critical, however, for important collaborative design functions such as team memory, design retrieval and negotiation. This paper describes an evolving Web-based tool designed to greatly improve the capture and access of preliminary and geometric design rationale in concurrent engineering teams, based on a marriage of rationale capture, the World Wide Web, CAD and feature-based design technology.