Management of cooperative product design process in virtual enterprise

The paper puts forward the architecture and the key implementation technologies of collaborative product design process management system. In order to provide an effective unified data model for a variety of applications in cooperative design environment, the paper suggests use XML Schema to define the product data model and exchange the heterogeneous data in XML to transmit data across different system platforms. The distributed cooperative controlling mechanism based on multi-agents is also discussed, and the whole status and progress of cooperative product design process can be monitored and managed dynamically through Gantt chart and resource allocation table, which provide an effective way for collaborative product design management.