Collaborative Product Development: EADS Pilot Based on ATHENA Results

ATHENA research program proposes innovative approach to address needs for interoperability of enterprise applications. It addresses in particular the area of Collaborative Product Design, for Aerospace but also other manufacturing sectors. Innovation comes from a holistic approach of the problem at enterprise, knowledge, ICT and semantic levels. It implies simultaneous advanced usage of technologies coming from various domains like enterprise modeling, Model Driven software engineering, Service Oriented Architecture, Collaborative Executable Business Process engineering and Semantic reconciliation. In the Aerospace sector, but also for numerous other industrial sectors (as automotive, furniture, ships, building...), current trend is to develop Product Life Cycle Management approaches across the virtual enterprise, with earlier consideration of downstream phases when designing product system, and important role of “Product Data Management”, “Product Data Exchange and Sharing” and “Change and Configuration Management processes”. This paper describes the used way to define accurate Aerospace Collaborative Product Development pilots, in order to reach ATHENA objectives in term of scientific achievement and business impact, and with as a result definition of a first set of pilots and a proposal for Networked Enterprise Collaborative Product Definition infrastructure.