Virtual Engineering

Virtual engineering refers to various scenarios where several independent companies or partners must perform product development or production engineering tasks in co-operation - that is, engineering in a virtual enterprise. Common examples of virtual engineering include the producer-supplier scenario, where product and its subcontractor-made components must be designed simultaneously, the mass customization scenario, where a customized product is composed from basic modules and components from several companies, and the multi-supplier project scenario, where several manufacturers contribute to the engineering and construction of a large design such as an industrial plant. Similarly to the related concept "concurrent engineering", virtual engineering must support the inclusion of all life-cycle issues of a product during its design. However, virtual engineering recognises explicitly the fundamental differences between the life-cycle viewpoints to a product, and aims at solutions that can work also on the basis of distributed heterogeneous information and systems. The term is also intended to cover activities denoted by related expressions "virtual prototyping" and "virtual manufacturing". From the viewpoint of information technology, the research challenge of virtual engineering is to identify and develop computational tools that support co-operation, information sharing, and coordination of activities for engineering teams in a virtual organization. These tools must be capable of operating in a distributed, heterogeneous environment where direct data sharing by means of jointly used data repositories or like is impossible or impractical. Further challenges are posed by the potentially large volume of shared data and the ill-structuredness of some of the necessary information. In the presentation, I will first analyse the basic requirements that computational tools for virtual engineering should satisfy. Next, industrial requirements of virtual engineering are discussed on the basis of studying the business processes that underlie and delienate virtual engineering activities. Finally, three application case studies of virtual engineering are briefly discussed to study the suitability of the above techniques. They are

• Design Process and Rationale Capture and Deployment, where the focus is on sharing product information across design teams during novel design
• Computational Infrastructure for Life-Cycle Assessment, where the focus is on sharing and reusing product information across different engineering applications (including legacy systems) and company borders during variant design
• Virtual Engineering and Construction of Multi-Supplier Projects, the focus of which is on sharing engineering process information to coordinate the activities of cooperating companies and on using the shared models to study and visualise the process.