Explore the knowledge distribution for making a family of products in an extended enterprise

Customer-driven market is driving production towards a trend of being able to supply a set of complicated variants within a couple of product families. Some approaches have been proposed to deal with product modeling of a family of products within a single-site company. But more and more companies are cooperating with each other to gain benefits in the fierce competition by organizing into extended enterprises (EE). The combination of EE and product family modeling brings new issues that have to be researched. This paper will explore the knowledge description and distribution for making a family of products in EE environment. Some critical concerns will be uncovered and analyzed. It shows that, the principle of generic bill-of-material (GBOM) theory is applicable in the new context, if some concerns can be translated into implementations. And a distributed rulebased solution is suggested to construct knowledge distribution for making a family of products by EE. Despite a lot of problems are still facing challenges, here a promising possibility is envisioned on a logic basis.