Integration-based cooperation in concurrent engineering

Motivated by global competition, rapid technological advance and
shorter
product life cycles, enterprises tend to restructure the
traditionally
sequential product development process into a collaborative,
concurrent,
and iterative effort called Concurrent Engineering. In
Concurrent
Engineering, design phases overlap and potentially incomplete
results are
exchanged between phases, facilitating early initiation of later
stages and
quick corrective feedback. The design process is typically
distributed,
sometimes involving experts around the globe cooperating in an
around-the-clock development effort.

We propose an information system for concurrent engineering
applications
based on a distributed object approach. We argue that due to
the manifold
interconnections and feedback loops in the design process, the
semantics of
the product data to be exchanged must be well-defined and
homogeneous
across the entire process. Hence we rely on a common data model
and
schema, a so-called product and production model. By contrast,
the
platforms within the engineering network may well be
heterogeneous. We
demonstrate how the model is implemented by a CORBA-based
... mehr
infrastructure,
which hides the physical distribution and heterogeneous
implementation of
the underlying data and applications. In addition to describing
the overall
architecture of the system, we address issues of object
persistence, model
evolution, presentation services and support for collaborative
work.