Product and process modelling in a cooperative environment: a case study for thermal power plant design

Abstract

Today, the product development approaches are evolving rapidly. Collaboration among multiple organisations and enterprises becomes an important key factor for design and construction of large and complex systems. To facilitate this collaboration, it is necessary to create an environment that enables integrated product and process development. The objective of this paper is to explain a distributed information infrastructure, which shares product data and process models in a collaborative environment. For this purpose, we firstly describe the problems related to product development and present a summary of actual research works in this domain. We represent the concepts related to product development using STEP standard. Then the proposed cooperative architecture is presented. Finally, we explain how we can design collaboratively a thermal power plant using these models.