A New Web Enabled Model for Product Structure and Collaboration in Product Development

Product development is a collaborative effort, in- volving multi-disciplinary functions, heterogeneous databases and applications. Product structure (PS) is the key element with which several variants of a given product can be instantiated with appropriate effectivity. Intelligence built into the product structure decides the reusability of this entity to generate variants for different customer requirements. This situation is comparable to that of the evolution of organisms caused by genes. The basic biochemical unit required to drive all biological processes is protein. Amino acids are the structural elements of proteins and each amino acid is produced by a specific gene. The groups of codons that are arranged in grammatically correct sequence are called the genes. Such attempts to model product development as a genetic process can be found in literature. The availability of functions like views, bill of materials (BOM) and product visualization/markup for a given product structure is critical for precise communication among different teams. A seamless integration of these functions and a proper mapping of the physical elements in the product development process with the information model are necessary to track and control the process throughout the product life cycle. Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Autovue solid model Application Program Interface (API) for Visualization and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for data access are used in its development..