Collaborative development support environment for complicated product

The development processes of complicated products, such as aero-engines, are across time, organizations and disciplines in multiple engineering teams, while the traditional coordination approaches and collaborative work tools are the bottleneck in this streamlining kind of processes in manufacturing enterprises. A collaborative development support environment (CDSE) for complicated products is presented to enable engineers to cooperate. The cooperation patterns in collaborative product development are concluded, and a reference model for the CDSE is put forward, which can describe the information, resources, activities, and applications in collaborative product development processes and depict their hierarchical relationship. This reference model has partially implemented and can offer a powerful and flexible environment for product development on the Internet by several member companies.