An implementation for collaborative manufacturing platform oriented to distributed environment

E-collaboration and collaborative systems bring geographically dispersed teams together, and support communication, coordination and cooperation among the enterprises. Based on the collaborative design system developed by the author's lab for some automotive parts company in China, several key technologies for developing Enterprise Collaborative Manufacturing Platform (ECMP) are presented. A multi-layer architecture of ECMP is established, and the workflow of ECMP is designed. The application integration with Web Services technology is explained. A four-layered ontology model for information description in ECMP is proposed. The method of constructing dynamic alliance based on multiagent theory, and the strategies of task scheduling optimization are discussed. Finally, an application case of ECMP prototypical system is introduced.