An intelligent data integration approach for collaborative project management in virtual enterprises

The increasing globalization and flexibility required by companies has generated new issues in the last decade related to the managing of large scale projects and to the cooperation of enterprises within geographically distributed networks. ICT support systems are required to help enterprises share information, guarantee data-consistency and establish synchronized and collaborative processes. In this paper we present a collaborative project management system that integrates data coming from aerospace industries with a main goal: to facilitate the activity of assembling, integration and the verification of a multi-enterprise project. The main achievement of the system from a data management perspective is to avoid inconsistencies generated by updates at the sources' level and minimizes data replications. The developed system is composed of a collaborative project management component supported by a web interface, a multi-agent data integration system, which supports information sharing and querying, and web-services that ensure the interoperability of the software components. The system was developed by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Gruppo Formula S.p.A. and tested by Alenia Spazio S.p.A. within the EU WINK Project (Web-linked Integration of Network based Knowledge-IST-2000-28221).