Collaborative e-Engineering environments to support Integrated Product Development

Abstract

Nowadays global product development tasks are executed by different facilities usually at different geographically location, where design and manufacturing teams must work remotely. This situation requires three major issues to be tackled: (1) implementation of a collaborative Integrated Product Development process among the different companies participating in the Product Life Cycle activities; (2) establishment of environments that foster the coordination and cooperation among engineering groups; (3) integration of software tools that allows the exchange of information and knowledge among engineers in an effective and efficient manner. A reference model for integrated product, process and manufacturing systems development is described and a methodology to implement Collaborative e-Engineering Environments is proposed to provide a model to transfer the e-engineering concepts to the industry. A case study is described that applied the proposed methodologies to set-up a collaborative environment for high tech product development using low-cost technologies. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.