Engineering Office Systems with Groupware Function

Abstract

Recently, distributed systems have prevailed according to computer's downsizing and groupware functions such as electronic mail have been used.
In engineering departments, EOA (Engineering Office Automation) including CAE, CAD/CAM, CASE becomes a important subject for having common informations.
In U. S., concurrent engineering has been applied to improve productivity in DICE project, Boeing Co., H. P. Co., Raytheon Co. and so on.
This paper discusses concurrent engineering, groupware functions and their effect on Engineering Office System (EOS) and also proposes a unified multimedia environment in EOS which enables real time electronic conferences combined with non-real time electronic conferences on a regular WAN system. It assumes traffic based on operation analysis results of survery within our company and defines network architecture methods using narrow band WAN and broad band LAN systems and discribes their characteristics.