Definition of an Engineering Data Management for Collaborative Product Development

Within the development of partnership and sub-contracting activities, collaborative design and data management processes are crucial for faster and better product development. Collaborative environments and integrated design are now deeply linked with product development activities. These practices are used to combine the strength, expertise and know-how of the best diverse, geographically dispersed technical teams to reach better mission scenarios, designs, and to develop corresponding technologies in less time [16]. This paper deals with the work done within the 6th framework project called VIVACE (Value Improvement through a Virtual Aeronautical Collaborative Enterprise) which involves most of the large aeronautic enterprises in Europe. The approach used by the Engineering Data Management Work Package of this project is motivated by the fact that data is not still well integrated and interoperable between partners’ systems. This paper focuses on the definition of interoperable environments and definition of context for use. In this paper, we develop the concepts reached during the VIVACE project. We present first a collaborative typology that is helpful to better understand constraints while partners attempt to collaborate. We then expose our guidelines for collaborative environment development by using the definition of a multi-layered architecture. We finally develop the components of this architecture and propose the definition of a scenario based on design/simulation loop.