Service-Oriented Infrastructure for Collaborative Product Design in ETO Enterprises

Engineer-to-order (ETO) products have some unique characteristics on their production process and supply chain models. These characteristics require that their design process should not only export product structure and production procedure information, but also consider other objectives, e.g., feasibility of production planning, cost, quality, service, etc. Different roles, including customers, suppliers, and related departments in ETO enterprises, should be integrated closely for frequent collaborations by exchanging mass of data during design process. To address this issue, in this paper we introduce a Web service based infrastructure for ETO product collaborative design, in which related product design systems, e.g., CAD, CAPP and PDM, and related business information systems, e.g., ERP, are all partially encapsulated as basic Web services, and according to several primitive service interoperability patterns, these services are collaborated together to realize data and process integration with the aid of enterprise service bus (ESB), consequently forms an integrated design ecosystem, to improve design efficiency for ETO products