A distributed product development architecture for engineering collaborations across ubiquitous virtual enterprises

In order to use high-fidelity analysis and design tools at the design stage, designers need to communicate with domain experts and their tools, which may be geographically dispersed over heterogeneous computing platforms. However, technical difficulties and ontological issues such as distributed computing, application integration, and distributed product information sharing impede the collaborative product development. This paper presents a distributed product development architecture for engineering collaborations across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. It provides an integrated framework for product development services to effectively communicate to realize true engineering application integration. The focus of this paper is to address three key issues. One is concerned with product information sharing and synchronization across virtual enterprises. Another is concerned with federations of product development services over the collaborative process. The third is related to the engineering context management using semantic web for providing more human-oriented collaborations services. A case study for developing a mobile phone is shown to validate the implementation of the proposed approach, which gives a great deal of possibilities for supporting a rich set of product development scenarios in ubiquitous environments.