Towards a distributed collaborative product engineering

Today information technology is the key support for designing essentials functions in the manufacturing industry across the entire product lifecycle. Understanding the whole complexity of these life-cycle functions and simplifying those which can give customers, and manufacturers, the greatest benefit can give a sustainable competitive advantage to enterprises. As product engineering becomes increasingly knowledge-intensive and collaborative, the need for computational framework based on the integration of people, information/knowledge and technology becomes more crucial. In this paper we discuss prerequisites to develop a distributed collaborative product engineering platform.