A review of Internet based collaborative product development systems

Nowadays, the globalization of manufacturing enterprises requires collaboration across the borders. This collaboration requires better coordination among the collaborators and good management of the product life cycle knowledge and information. In order to support taking correct engineering decisions among the distributed companies, product life cycle knowledge and information must be provided to the engineers in the right place, time and format. Recently, various research initiatives in Internet based manufacturing have focused on developing applications to support product development across the geographical barriers. This paper reviews and analyses major initiative projects on collaborative product development systems. It identifies major issues that have emerged from these developments and discusses issues that have not been addressed. These will be the major challenges for future research of Collaborative Product Development Systems.