Research on Internet-based system architecture for collaborative product development

In the competitive world of the 21 century, companies must improve the way they develop new products. With new technologies continuously emerging, it becomes more and more important for manufacturing enterprises to evaluate and choose appropriate technologies for specific situations and to keep the balance between the advantages of technologies and the feasibility of implementation. This paper proposes an Internet-based solution to facilitate Collaborative Product Development (CPD) in manufacturing enterprises. In the proposed system architecture, an Internet-based collaboration platform provides all participants with basic facilities, including collaboration services and database services. In the middle layer of the architecture, RCM-based (Result-Chain based Modelling) process management module, product structure management module, visualization module, and multimedia conference module work together to support collaboration between participant and no-participant users. Implementation technologies and future work are discussed in the paper.