Scalable Enterprise Systems: Coopetitive Design and Manufacture Across Organizations

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This grant provides funding for a interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together design and manufacturing experts with computer science experts to define a scalable information infrastructure to support product design in a multi-organization environment with limited but crucial trust and sharing in a cooperative context. To this end, this project will study the decomposition of a large design into smaller pieces that are worked on relatively independently; it will use and extend the XML internet standard to create a mechanism for "self-description" of an object-oriented design database structure so that each design group can independently choose to organize information in the most suitable form for its purpose, along with a schema description and access control meta-data in a standardized format; and it will develop tools to manage collaborative design in a diffuse distributed context, with shifting coalitions and topics of interest, using a generalized publish/subscribe model. The end result of this project will be to create the basis upon which to build a comprehensive inter-enterprise design information management system. The results obtained from this research will reduce time-to-market and increase efficiencies in the design of complex products such as automobiles. It also has the potential to revolutionize enterprise resource management.