Information management system for dynamic product development in distributed manufacturing enterprise

Information management is believed to be one of the key enabling technologies for collaboration in product development. It would support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product and process information across organization boundary. This paper proposes a framework and underlying enabling technologies and methodologies for a novel information management system for dynamic product development processes in distributed manufacturing enterprise. It allows product development process to be created and defined flexibly and dynamically, enables design data be disseminated at fine granularity among the distributed processes, and facilitates fast system reconfiguration to adapt to frequent change of processes and products. It also supports the information exchange between product development and other business processes in intra/inter manufacturing.