Philosophies for integrated product development

Integrated product development occurs when the different disciplines in an enterprise. whether real or virtual, collaborate to design and produce part s. This paper presents a concept and architecture for an Integrated Tele-Co operative Manufacturing (ITCM) environment. The ITCM concept is a new appro ach to product development, where parallel interactions among the various d isciplines in an enterprise, such as marketing, business, design and produc tion, are organized to establish a time-ordered application of people, meth ods and tools. This would ensure a thorough understanding of the product an d process information that can be shared by all members of the product deve lopment team. The ITCM architecture is a new infrastructure that handles he terogeneous data, and integrates software applications using web servers, d atabases, document conferencing software, operating systems and integration utilities. It consists of a resource manager, a supervisory manager and a database manager who work together to enable concurrent multi-user and mult i-application interactions. The ITCM concept and architecture will allow co operation by people, resources and applications who are geographically dist ributed to work concurrently on a shared database of the design to produce a part successfully. A pilot ITCM scheme is planned in the Singapore contex t. It is a joint project with industry and a research institute.