Managing Collaborative Process Planning Activities through Extended Enterprise

Abstract

Nowadays, the competitive global scenario has driven companies to work within extended enterprises. In this context, the collaborative product design and development process have to take into account all the geographically dispersed manufacturing resources. In order to enable real digital manufacturing, companies are forced to share and distribute data, information and knowledge through collaborative procedures. Particularly, manufacturing process planning activities, which are the link between product development and manufacturing, become crucial to achieve global efficiency. The objective of this chapter is, for these reasons, to define a reference model for collaborative process planning, taking into account certain basic requirements in order to enable an inter-enterprise environment. For the implementation of the reference model, a workflow modelling strategy and a reference architecture are presented that could enable collaborative processes management.