SOA-based product knowledge management for collaborative engineering in virtual enterprises

The paper addresses the problem of product knowledge management in virtual enterprises. The proposed approach is based on the idea of representing virtual enterprise members via services provided by them. This makes it possible to abstract from real virtual enterprise members and to deal with a Web service network instead. The C3S3P (Concept Study, Scaffolding, Scoping, and Requirements Modelling) methodology is used for product knowledge modeling. These best practices were represented as active knowledge models. Capturing organisational knowledge is facilitated via usage of the concept of task patterns based on the industrial case taken from product development in automotive supplier industries. Since the evaluation was of just one year and included only four industrial companies from two different domains, future work is planned to include a comparison between different industries and also include experiences from a larger number of task pattern developments.