Project Management Architecture and Mechanisms of Distributed Cooperative Product Development

The project management architecture and mechanisms of distributed concurrent product design in a virtual enterprise are discussed. The process of project management and its functions are presented. First, aiming at the characteristics of distributed concurrent product design process, the architecture of project management of distributed cooperative product design in the virtual enterprise is presented to adapt to distributed concurrent development of complex products. The main advantages of the architecture are also discussed. As to product design project, it is impossible to establish a detail plan before the project implementation starts because project planning and implementation progress by turns. Task decomposition module dynamically establishes the task decomposition structure and the relationships among tasks. Adopting object oriented ideas and UML modeling tool, partner selection in the virtual enterprise is modeled. After the functions of partner selection are analyzed and determined, the multi-level partner selection architecture is constructed using Web technology and database technology. Based on gray relation analysis, partner selection is carried out based on the evaluation indices and weights extracted from the information provided by candidate enterprises. Finally, according to project schedule and actual resource status, process fusion module determines task flow based on task decomposition and distribution structure. Consequently, because task decomposition and distribution structure is a nesting one, process fusion is also a nesting one.