Web Services as a Virtual Product Development Environment

As a result of a new product development paradigm, there is a greater need for software tools to effectively support the formal representation, collect and exchange of product information during the product development stage. This paper presents a vision of next-generation engineering working environments for virtual enterprises. The concept of “Virtual product development environment” (VPDE) that is enabled by a new generation of Internet based services is discussed. In considering the VPDE, the following issues have been identified as crucial: (i) integration of different applications within the same organization; (ii) integration of organizations, applications and content between different organizations in the same virtual enterprise; (iii) integration of partners. The Web Service, the latest evolutionary step in distributed computing, has been proposed as the platform for realizing the VPDE infrastructure. Different possible roles of the Web Services technology in the process of product development are explained: organizational model, vocabularies definition, integration of processes and actions in product development, and communication of the product development process status. A Web Service for Collaborative Product Data Management as a test study of the presented research is introduced.