Building public concurrent engineering frameworks on a national information infrastructure

As manufacturing enterprises form partnerships with both local and international partners, there is an increased need for a public collaborative framework for communication of information, cooperation among team members, and coordination of project tasks. The paper describes how Singapore´s National Information Infrastructure (NII) can be used to rapidly build such a public collaborative framework for manufacturing enterprises. This framework will allow these companies to integrate their internal operations, collaborate with other companies, and access information for strategic business planning as well as product design. The NII will provide transparent computing services and large-grain reusable objects. Software development will be transformed from custom-made applications to a component-oriented industry. With the NII, the proposed public collaborative framework will have a nation-wide testbed on which it can be implemented and evaluated