Towards a personalized concurrent engineering Internet services platform

Engineers are individuals. Engineers usually participate in different projects in parallel. Therefore they need a personalized workplace with easy access to data, information and knowledge. A generic Internet-based workplace easily configurable on demand, equipped with intelligent tools and basic concurrent engineering (CE) system capabilities is sought. Such a personal CE system must be capable to manage multi-project participation in different virtual enterprises with different client-server systems. The workplace tools should also allow easy access to rental engineering services on the net, such as special engineering software or design code repositories. It has to provide e-commerce and e-payment including proper authorization according to the employee status of each engineer. The workplace must be personalizable to individual working styles and sustainable over long time. Such a workplace is like a service platform. The platform should be capable of plugging into servers of different virtual enterprises. For this, a new plugging-in technique is developed, which will also provide access to the electronic market place and support e-commerce asa business model. The user-relevant information like information and knowledge management data will be kept on the platform, whereas mass data storage should be outsourced.