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Automobile development needs more and more collaborative work involving geographical dispersed designers, that brings difficulty for model verification, conception review and assembly process evaluation, so a collaborative virtual environment for automobile based on network is required. In this kind of environment, designers can do interactive assembly operations collaboratively, such as grasp, move, release, collision detection (CD), assembly evaluation report generation, etc. Furthermore, automobile structure becomes more complicated, how to process this large real‐time data effectively in real‐time interactive virtual environment is a great challenge. The purpose of this paper is focus on this.

A distributed parallel virtual assembly environment (DPVAE) is developed. In this environment, the mechanism of event synchronization based on high‐level architecture/run‐time infrastructure) is applied to realize multi‐user collaboratively interactive operation. To meet the large data set real‐time processing demand, a creative parallel processing approach supported by a single supercomputer or a parallel processing environment composed of common personal computer in a high‐speed local area network is developed. The technologies such as real‐time CD, multiple interactive operation modals are applied in DPVAE and several auxiliary tools are provide to help achieving whole scheme review, component model verification and assembly evaluation.

This paper finds that DPVAE system is an available and efficient tool to support automobile collaborative assembly design.

Designers can discuss and verify the assembly scheme to realize the previous design scenario in DPVAE, so it is useful for reducing costs, improving quality and shortening the time to market, especially for new type automobile development.

A combination of distributed technology and parallel computing technology is applied in product virtual assembly, solving the problems including collaborative work of multi‐user and large data real‐time processing successfully, that provides a useful tool for automobile development.

Owing to the numerous part models and massive datasets used in automobile assembly design, virtual assembly software cannot simulate a whole vehicle smoothly in real time. For this reason, implementing a new virtual assembly environment for massive complex datasets would be a significant achievement. The paper aims to focus on this problem.

A new system named “Grid‐enabled collaborative virtual assembly environment” (GCVAE) is proposed in the paper, and it comprises three parts: a private grid‐based support platform running on an inner network of enterprise; a service‐based parallel rendering framework with a sort‐last structure; and a multi‐user collaborative virtual assembly environment. These components would aggregate the idle resources in an enterprise to support assembly simulation with a large complex scene of whole vehicle.

The system prototype proposed in the paper has been implemented. The following simulations show that it can support a complex scene in a real‐time mode by using existing hardware and software, and can promote the efficient usage of enterprise resources.

Using the GCVAE, it is possible to aggregate the idle resources in an enterprise to run assembly simulations of a whole automobile with massively complex scenes, thus observably reducing fault occurrence rates in future manufacturing.

The paper introduces a new grid‐enabled methodology into research on collaborative virtual assembly system which can make the best use of idle resources in the enterprise to support assembly simulations with massively complex product models. A video‐stream‐based method was used to implement the system; this enables designers to participate ubiquitously in the simulation to evaluate the assembly of the whole automobile without hardware limitations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an assembly modelling approach to be applied with a software package, to assist in the design and assembly of special purpose machines (SPMs).

A database of SPM elements was established, and an assembly relationships graph was created. Mating conditions were identified between the SPM elements, and their assembly constraints were extracted and implemented in SolidWorks application programming interface.

The implementation of this assembly modelling approach was validated by selecting SPM layouts as examples. A significant reduction in the assembly time was achieved compared to the traditional assembly procedure for the same examples.

This is a new application of assembly modelling that assists engineers and designers in the design and assembly processes of SPMs. This approach can also be applied to other machine tools with similar attributes.