Integration of case-based reasoning systems for collaborative new product development

Collaborative new product development is a common practice in most of the companies to maintain their competitiveness in global competition. Case-based reasoning system can provide the most similar cases for the new product development project to shorten the time-to-market of new product. However, most of the CBRS are limited to the cases created within the company. It would be very difficult to access information about collaborative partners before the collaborating project started. Therefore, sharing of product cases between collaborating partners becomes a research issue. This paper makes sharing of design cases between partners become easier by utilizing the ontology alignment technology to integrate the case-based reasoning systems of the collaborating partners. The case library structure of collaborating partner is merged with main CBRS through the merge of ontology of the library.