沈峻巖

Allied concurrent engineering is defined by unifying the concepts of virtual enterprise and concurrent engineering in the engineering processes. It aims to integrate the engineering activities and resources from different enterprises through enterprise alliances to quickly respond to customer expectations. The management of engineering data to ensure that the right information is quickly provided to the right place at the right time in the right format is one of the most critical tasks in the engineering process. Within the practice of allied concurrent engineering, the importance and difficulty of engineering data management is increased due to the issues of inter-enterprise communication and process control, system heterogeneity, information and system security, differing engineering data formats and multi-database formats. The objective of this research is to develop a distributed engineering data management approach for the practice of allied concurrent engineering (ACE). An ACE-based engineering data management methodology was developed under the concepts of enterprise integration to manage the product and process data in an integrated fashion both within the enterprise and outside the enterprise’s allied engineering partners. This methodology includes a life cycle model for engineering data management, a hierarchical and distributed data management framework, and a reference model and rules for engineering data management. Based on this methodology, an ACE-based engineering data management system was developed using Unified Modeling Language (UML) modeling techniques. The result of this research will enable the practice of allied concurrent engineering and consequently help increase product development capability and quality, reduce development cycle time and cost, and hence increase product marketability.