Enabling allied concurrent engineering through distributed engineering information management

The management of engineering information to ensure that the right information is quickly provided to the right place at the right time in the right format is one of the most critical tasks in the engineering process. Within the practice of allied concurrent engineering, the importance and difficulty of engineering information management is increased due to the issues of inter-enterprise communication and process control, system heterogeneity, information and system security, differing engineering data formats and multi-database formats. This paper presents an engineering information management approach for the practice of allied concurrent engineering (ACE). An ACE-based engineering information management methodology is proposed under the concept of enterprise integration. This methodology includes an information management life cycle, a distributed management framework, and rules and methods for information management. Based on this methodology, an ACE-based engineering information system was developed using Unified Modeling Language (UML) modeling techniques. The result of this research will enable the practice of allied concurrent engineering and consequently help increase product development capability and quality, reduce development cycle time and cost, and hence increase product marketability. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.