Dynamic data sharing and security in a collaborative product definition management system

Product definition management (PDM) is a system that supports management of both engineering data and the product development process during the total product life cycle. The formation of a virtual enterprise is becoming a growing trend, and vendors of PDM systems have recently developed a new generation of PDM systems called collaborative product definition management (cPDM). This paper presents the concept of a virtual engineering community (VEC) to support concurrent product development within geographically distributed partners. A previous case study has shown that collaborative engineering design may be modelled from a parameter perspective [1]. Effective implementation of the parameter approach raises the following problems: how to support data sharing and secure that span the partner borders. This paper describes the system architecture, deployed security mechanisms, the prototype developed within cPDM, and the system demonstration using a real test. The implementation of this architecture extends a common commercial PDM system (Axalan (TM)) and utilizes standard software to create a security framework for the involved resources. Collaboration infrastructure, shared team spaces and shared resources are essential to enable virtual teams to work together. Various organizational and technical challenges are implied. The outlined architecture features a federated data approach. These issues are discussed and potential perspectives in the area of collaboration engineering are identified. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.