CAREER: Design and Implementation of a Virtual Product Development Environment

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This Faculty Early Career Development (Career) award focuses on Collaborative Product Development, combining research and education to (1) explore the information foundation in which globally distributed, collaborating engineers can design and develop world-class products and (2) develop a framework in which global engineers can participate and develop products in a real time basis. The information foundation will investigate an Internet based engineering information model that will share public and private information to achieve an integrated multi-partnership environment with focus on how to securely share collaborator's private information in a consistent way. Once the information foundation is established, a distributed decision support framework will be developed that will integrate partner pre-qualification, dynamic analysis of partner's conflict and negotiation for partners' conflicts resolution. Based on the model and the framework developed, a Virtual Product Development Environment (VPDE), a prototype system will be implemented. VPDE will illustrate the procedure for enterprises to realize product development in a collaborative environment. The VPDE prototype system will include an Internet based information system, Internet based partner pre-qualification, Internet based Conflict Analysis and Internet based Partner negotiation modules. The education plan focuses on translating the VPDE into an instructional version that will integrate the outcomes of the proposed research with undergraduate and graduate education. This will also be a vehicle for minority outreach education programs, both at the undergraduate level and for workforce training. Various "designing active learning methodologies" will be explored to generate Internet-based exercises to demonstrate the role of engineering information systems and distributed decision support systems in collaborative product development. An online graduate course on Distributed Information System will also be developed.