Efficient Product Data Sharing in Collaboration Life Cycles

The efficiency of the collaboration is a decisive factor for successful product development and production. The processes of the Collaboration Life Cycle should be supported with powerful IT tools to increase efficiency. This paper introduces some concepts of the Collaboration Life Cycle and discusses aspects of collaboration. To overcome the integration problem in product development collaborations standard-based solutions including methodology and tools, which have been achieved in the joint project “PDM Collaborator” are presented. The focus is on the components Collaboration Services and the Federation Services, which create one virtual PDM system that contains all the product data, needed for the collaboration process.