Engineering portal with coordination mechanism for collaborative product development

In nowadays, product development processes become very complicate in terms of product complexity, global manufacturing and management. Engineering portal, which integrates the distributed application servers in web environment, is proven to be able to support collaborative product development. This paper introduced a four-tiered client/server engineering portal architecture, which allows task analysis, data sharing, and collaboration among team members in an internet platform. A complex operation request could be decomposed into several discrete tasks, which could be partitioned into corresponding task groups with different internal interaction relationship via design structure matrix analysis method. The application tools are registered with the coordinator via establishment of registry. The association between tasks and application tools is managed by the proposed coordinate mechanism, which enable users to access the corresponding tools over internet. Manufacturing enterprises could therefore effectively collaborate with their partners global widely.