Remote collaborative product development in a product development chain

A product development chain is a system that connects, using a computer network, an assembler, its suppliers and other related product development parties in order to carry out product development activities such as design, prototyping and testing. In other words, a product development chain includes a computer network and a set of associated applications by which product development partners, who may be located in geographically remote sites, exchange and share product development information and resources in order to achieve remote collaboration in product development.; Three major phases for developing a product using a product development chain can be identified. The first phase includes the decomposition of the product development task and the allocation of the decomposed tasks to the suppliers. Once the design task for each supplier has been determined, the suppliers are able to develop the design relatives autonomously with limited communication and information sharing with other suppliers. This second phase can be called parallel design. The third phase of product development using a product development chain is a process to integrate component data from each supplier and to test the integrity of the design. For this thesis, certain key research issues are selected and addressed in each of these product development phases.; This thesis contains several contributions to the research in this area. First, the literature in this area of remote collaborative product development in a product development chain is described. This includes a review of the related work and the identification of the remote collaborative product development phases, along with the research issues associated with each phase. Second, several key research issues associated with each remote collaborative product development phase are addressed. This includes design task decomposition and design task allocation in the design task decomposition and distribution phase, collaborative interface development in the parallel design phase (focused on the application of mechanical design), and assembly process visualization in the component integrity evaluation and testing phase (focused on the application of mechanical design).