Managing Design and Manufacturing Constraints in a Distributed Industrial Environment: The Creation of a Managed Environment for Engineering Design

Considerable effort is currently being directed in industry toward the reduction of time in the development of new products. This has led to a great interest in the principles of concurrent engineering [1]. Here the aim is to draw as many of the processes required into parallel, or as a minimum, overlapping operations. Such processes, whilst in theory providing a great reduction in lead times, result in greater complexities in the organisation and management of the whole operation.