Abstract

Effective information sharing and decision coordination are vital to collaborative product development and integrated manufacturing. However, typical special-purpose CAE systems tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, and typical integrated CAE systems tend to limit flexibility and process innovation. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project strikes a balance between these undesirable extremes by supporting reconfigurable exchange of engineering knowledge among special-purpose CAE systems. SHADE's approach has three main components: a shared knowledge representation (language and domain-specific vocabulary), protocols supporting information exchange for change notification and subscription, and facilitation services for content-directed routing and intelligent matching of information consumers and producers. 1 Introduction At the heart of effective concurrent engineering is communication. In product development, something is always changing-perhaps a design requireme...

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