An approach for product data exchange in cooperative shipbuilding projects

To cope with the strong world-wide economic competition in the shipbuilding industry, ship builders as well as suppliers have to establish highly flexible networks for conception, design and production of a ship. To establish a network cooperation between these partners there is a need for a flexible product data structure through which work packages containing design tasks can be exchanged. For this exchange a suitable communication structure hosted by a communication platform is needed. This paper describes an approach for the exchange of product data which integrates a structural view to a shipbuilding project as well as a work package structure represented through XML documents forming a practical product data model. The work packages are formed by predefined data objects representing particular views to the shipbuilding project which are relevant for the individual design task.