TOWARDS OPEN-ARCHITECTURE CONCURRENT ENGINEERING FRAMEWORKS

This speculative paper discusses the state of the art of Concurrent Engineering research and proposes a new approach concentrating on the theories and methodologies required for the construction of Open Architecture Concurrent Engineering Frameworks, Ideally, such a framework would be based on (1) a Concurrent Engineering Modeling System, (2) a Concurrent Engineering Toolkit, and (3) a Concurrent Engineering Configurator capable of configuring a concurrent engineering system from the Concurrent Engineering Toolkit components on the basis of the Concurrent Engineering Model. Some principal dimensions of a Concurrent Engineering Model, and their effect on process planning systems are investigated to illustrate the dependencies of model and system characteristics.