A peer to peer based approach to collaborative product engineering

In this paper we present key elements of a peer to peer (P2P) based software architecture for integrated and collaborative product engineering. We argue that distributed and cross-enterprise product lifecycle management can benefit from the availability of decentrally managed product model repositories. We present the overall system architecture of a platform called Peer-to-Peer Product Collaboration Platform (PCP). Our focus in this paper is on the design of a decentral product model metadata repository and registry based on a peer-to-peer resource management platform, and on a prototype implementation of an Eclipsebased tool for editing and browsing the metadata repository.