Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems are used by thousands of engineering companies world wide. Improving these systems will have a drastic and global effect. One possible improvement is to integrate synchronous collaborative applications with PLM systems. These applications allow multiple people to work on a single digital object simultaneously. They have already been shown to reduce the time a task requires. Using these applications to complete a project will reduce the project time. However, simply including synchronous collaborative applications within a PLM system ignores powerful benefits that could provide further time-saving benefits. The integration must allow improved awareness at the project level, so that users can mediate their own actions.This thesis presents a method for such an integration. It also presents a prototype which implements that method. Testing was carried out using this prototype. As hypothesized, including synchronous collaborative applications shortened the overall project time. In addition, providing awareness information and allowing users to mediate themselves further shortened project times and reduced variation in those times. Proper integration should therefore provide awareness at the project level and allow users to mediate themselves to some extent.

This thesis compares different approaches of creating a collaborative editing application using different methods such as OT, CRDT and Locking. After a comparison between these methods an implementation based on CRDT was done. The implementation of a collaborative graphical network was made such that consistency is guaranteed. The implementation uses the 2P2P-Graph which was extended in order to support moving of nodes, and uses the client-server communication model. An evaluation of the implementation was made by creating a time-complexity and a space complexity analysis. The result of the thesis includes a comparison between different methods and by an evaluation of the Extended 2P2P-Graph.