Collaboration between multiple organizations and companies is becoming commonplace for the design and manufacture of large, complex, mechanical systems. These systems include such things as airframes, automobiles and ships. Virtual enterprise is a term often used to describe such collaborations. A virtual enterprise allows its member organizations to respond collectively to favorable market conditions for new product development in situations where the members individually would be unable to respond effectively.
As part of the collaboration, the members of a virtual enterprise share their expertise, software tools, and product data with other members in the virtual enterprise. This sharing of resources provides a competitive advantage for the virtual enterprise that justifies its existence. Flexible management of the shared resources is an important requirement for the virtual enterprise to achieve its full potential. Otherwise, the effectiveness of the collaboration diminishes greatly. An information infrastructure is one way for a virtual enterprise to provide the required management of its resources.
This paper concentrates on managing product data in an information infrastructure for a virtual enterprise. For the purposes of this paper, product data includes all data required for the design and manufacture of a mechanical system (e.g., shape data, configuration data, and manufacturing process plans). We assume that each of the members of a virtual enterprise has its own product data and that some of this product data is shared with other members. We also assume that a high-speed computer network connects the members of a virtual enterprise. The information infrastructure uses this network to share product data. This network may be a dedicated network, an intranet or the Internet.
Product data originates in the various design and manufacturing systems used by the members of the virtual enterprise. Each of these systems has its own proprietary formats for saving data as files or in a database. In general, it is not possible to take a file or database produced by one tool and use it as input to another tool. Therefore, one of the requirements for the information infrastructure is that it provides a common format for the representation and exchange of product data between the software tools of the virtual enterprise members. One way to accomplish this is to base the information infrastructure on the emerging ISO STEP family of standards.