Development of a Collaboration System based on Mobile Framework in the Field of Ships and Marine Industry

Abstract

Engineering information in the shipbuilding and marine industry should be inevitably modified owing to frequent changes in, for example, customer's requirements and product specifications. Such a working environment caused by a discrepancy in information between engineering and production departments can have inefficient effects on production tasks. In order to perform efficient production tasks, staff in a production department should have easy access to the latest information in engineering. Furthermore, information should be easy and prompt in sharing and searching when needed. In this paper, we propose a development of collaborative system based on mobile framework. This proposed system facilitates its application to the work environment in the shipbuilding and marine industry. Moreover, it particularly saves resources in shipyards such as energy and costs of labor and materials. Mobile techniques, such as XML, SOAP and Android, which have been used in this paper are useful for implementing functions of sharing and searching for information in a distributed environment. The purpose of the system proposed in this paper is to provide system users with a collaborative environment which is based on an online and paperless mobile framework, when different kinds of tasks are required due to changes in engineering information. This proposed system not only can check information in production tasks in real time but also can implement functions based on mobile framework. By reducing the discrepancy in information between the engineering and production departments, this collaborative system can be implemented effectively.