Engineering Collaboration

In the internet age, collaborative product development has led to new challenges for OEM’s, suppliers and development partners. In the course of globalisation, engineering activities come together and companies are forced to follow innovative concepts concerning product development processes. This paper presents a framework to support dynamic product development processes for cross-cultural, global value constellations by providing semantic information model standards and suitable software components. The software framework serves as an open development- and integration platform for both information models and functions which cover the relevant aspects of cross-cultural engineering collaboration.

Today manufacturers of complex investment goods concentrate on their core business and retrieve additional services from external subcontractors. Many design reviews are necessary to coordinate such cooperation. They cause high expense for manpower and for travel. In the research project “Digital Product Development with Virtually Cooperating Teams using Optical Networks” a new conference system will be realised, which utilizes Virtual Reality (VR). This paper describes the requirements and the process flow of future distributed design reviews as well as the method of solution which is prototypical realized in the project ProViT.