Secure Sharing of Design Genes in CAD Models for Collaborative Design

In the context of collaborative design, it is a challenge to effectively protect some IP(Intellectual Property) information while the model needs to be shared to another designer for co-design activities. In biology, genes determine the essential biological attributes of species and should be well kept. For collaborative design, the IP information of a CAD model is analogous to biological genes and can be therefore defined as Design Genes (DGs) to be protected during collaboration. Based on this concept, this paper presents a novel approach of DG based secure sharing of CAD models to support collaborative design. The approach consists of the following steps. Firstly, an innovative concept of DGs in a collaborative CAD model is defined used for representing protected knowledge in the model during collaboration. Secondly, a filter is introduced to identify the DGs of the model flexibly. An encryption algorithm is then described to encrypt the identified DGs of the model as encrypted DGs, while the other parts of the model are still geometrically valid and sharable to support collaborative design. Finally, case studies are used to validate the above steps. The innovation of the approach is the introduction of the innovative concept of DGs, development of related filter and encryption algorithm to ensure the security of critical information during collaborative design. The complexity of case studies can prove that the approach is applicable to realworld application scenarios.