Collaborative Engineering Communities- Architecture and Integration Approaches

Abstract

Regarding the growing task distribution in the area of design and product development (engineering), the idea of communities gets more importance next to the creation of classical development partnerships in engineering. Communities are known as a new organizational kind for users of electronic communication media. The main aim of this chapter is to transfer the idea of communities to engineering networks. Therefore an overview on creation, requirements and profit of collaborative engineering communities is provided. Also a possible integration is shown between collaborative engineering environments and enterprise resource planning systems.