Collaborative Product Development Services

Product Data Management (PDM) / Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems are fully recognised in the industry domain to shorten product development time by enabling data integration along the product lifecycle in distributed organisations: design, workflow, change history, manufacturing and maintenance. These systems successfully
handle the storage and access control of product data.

However, experts of consulting PDM companies require that for effective collaboration between partners (manufacturers, suppliers, and engineering) product data must be accessible and comprehensible to people with varying skills and expertise and product data must also remain secure, yet be readily accessible.
In this context, Collaborative Product Development (C-PD) Services focus on the use of PDM systems to provide additional Knowledge Management capabilities, such as assembly ontologies, history data management, and knowledge sharing, supporting:

• Uniform and computable formalised description of data
• Existing knowledge reuse by semantic queries for knowledge storage and retrieval
• The sharing of a common view and common data between
• collaborating entities
• Design of product families, oriented to mass customization.

The requirements for continuous innovation impose new challenges for the ideas generation and tracking, RTD activities, technology transfer and associated business models. Social software has made revolutionary changes in our way of communicating and collaborating. C-PD addresses
the challenge to analyse the social approach in Product Lifecycle Management and 3D product development, and how to take advantage of user involvement and information sharing in a multi-stakeholder environment to foster innovation, by:

• Enabling users to experience new products in realistic, virtual scenarios
• Supporting knowledge exchange and among industry, academia and users technology transfer in business ecosystems, involving universities, research centres in the innovation process
• Performing a multi-stakeholder competence and collaboration analysis.
• Supporting visualization, annotation and inspection of design models in multidisciplinary and distributed teams

In COIN C-PD web services provide the following functionalities:

• Semantic search for services needed in the product development process, based on the product structure ontology. Semantic search for companies that provide the required product / service in a product development process, taking into account related competences.

• Enhance the manageability of large amount of product and process data (customer preferences, part lists, documents, bill of materials, operations, etc), and the relations between them, which aims at reusing information for product development processes. Advanced visualization services to present information and semantic relations in a meaningful way.
•   Help in the Ontology building process, automatically extracting ontology classes and subclasses from text sources or from relational databases (JDBC data extractor). It will also help to avoid manual data insertion in the ontology once it is defined, automatically processing product datasheets to fill the ontology and avoiding manual uploading of data in the product and service catalogue, helping to the manageability of the system for future product development processes.
• Foster collaborative 3D design, for product developers - enabling 3D file sharing and annotation between different product design teams - and end-users - enabling the broad dissemination of product designs, and collecting the information in an automatic way, taking into account end users position, improving the analysis of the gathered information, visualizing it and therefore improving the product design process.