Comparative Evaluation of Cad Systems as Engineering Design Architectures

There is a need for advanced collaboration tools to meet the needs of increasingly complex engineering design challenges and of global design teams. Specifically, virtual design reviews are a means by which teams can obtain a better understanding of a product’s design. Many CAD systems have integrated cloud features, which can be utilized to perform design reviews within these systems. The focus of this paper is to evaluate CAD systems in three CAD architectures: traditional, cloud-enabled, and cloud-native, to assess their capabilities and highlight areas of improvement for CAD developers. Using a list of previously generated requirements, CAD systems were evaluated on how well they met each requirement to determine how they can foster collaborative work. While cloud-native CAD systems performed the best against the requirements, no CAD system was able to fully meet all requirements, showcasing multiple areas for future development.