Sharing Information Throughout a Product Lifecycle via Markup of Product Models Available to Purchase

The advances in wireless communication and the Internet are leading to an ever-more-global economy and unprecedented changes in business processes. Such a highly competitive global market demands that engineering companies must consider the entire product lifecycle and take advantages of different regions of the world by collaboration between groups based in different geographic locations. The experiences of collaborative enterprises have shown up many issues of communication and information sharing between separate teams or different users at different stages of a product lifecycle. This paper proposes a new strategy to strengthen information sharing among users and partners through the whole product lifecycle. The proposed method utilizes a CAD model to act as a centre-carrier to link the information generated by different users, especially at later stages of the product lifecycle, no matter which formats of the product (i.e., the original CAD model or its derived lightweight representations) the users own. The method provides further support in sharing and retrieving relevant information directly via the CAD model.