Holonic Engineering Data Management Framework for Allied Concurrent Engineering

Virtual enterprise and concurrent engineering are two of the most promising business strategies to address global competition. By unifying the concepts of virtual enterprise and concurrent engineering, allied concurrent engineering aims to integrate the engineering activities and resources from different enterprises through enterprise alliances to quickly respond to customer expectations. This paper presents a holonic system framework for engineering data management to support allied concurrent engineering. The framework is designed based on the concepts of holonic systems to reflect the distributed, collaborative, agile, dispersed and heterogeneous natures of allied concurrent engineering processes. In the proposed framework, key elements such as information items, libraries, and information management units etc. are defined as "holons" which have autonomous, cooperative and configurable properties.