Core services for coordination in concurrent engineering

Product development has increasingly become a cooperative endeavor that requires effective coordination in the face of complex dependencies over agents, time and functional perspectives. Distinct coordination support technologies have emerged for each of these kinds of distribution, but all face important limitations. This paper presents a unified model of concurrent engineering coordination that synergistically combines existing approaches in a way that avoids many of their individual limitations and combines their strengths. This model is based on an inclusive dependency capture language plus core coordination services for dependency capture, process enactment and exception handling. An initial implementation of this model is presented and challenges for future evolution of this technology are identified.