Collaborative Product Development: EADS Pilot Based on ATHENA

Abstract

When willing to support collaboration within enterprise or between enterprises, it is required to support fast establishment of communication and interactions between numerous organizations, disciplines and actors. More and more, it implies to be able to interconnect enterprise applications that support involved partners and their communication, authoring and management processes. This paper presents an innovative federation framework and associated usage, which composes an effective way already existing enterprise, knowledge and application interoperability frameworks that are themselves standardized. The framework is defined according ATHENA vision, addressing interoperability at Enterprise, knowledge and Information/Communication technologies and establishing links at semantic level by means of ontologies for information, service and processes. The framework aims to address governance, organizational and technological brakes identified in industrial context when willing to establish fast and effective eCollaboration, providing modeling and execution platforms able to produce executable collaboration models and supporting round-trip development, that is a pre-requisite when willing to federate legacy solutions of partners involved within the collaboration. It proposes policies for choice, composition and usage of de jure and de facto standards that will remove these brakes. It will be validated within the particular domain of collaborative Product Development within Aerospace sector.