A collaborative development support environment for complicated product

The development processes of complicated products, such as aero-engines, are across time, organizations and disciplines in multiple engineering teams, while traditional coordination approaches and collaborative work tools are the bottleneck in streamlining this kind of processes in manufacturing enterprises. In this paper, a collaborative development support environment (CDSE) for complicated products is presented to enable engineers involved in the product development project to cooperate efficiently. The cooperation patterns in collaborative product development are concluded, and a reference model for the CDSE is put forward, which can describe the information, resources, activities, and applications in collaborative product development processes and depict their hierarchical relationship. This reference model has partially implemented by our research group and can offer a powerful and flexible environment for product development on the Internet by several member companies.