Integrated design in a service marketplace

This paper presents a service marketplace vision for enterprise-wide integrated design modeling. In this environment, expert participants and product development organizations are empowered to publish their geometric design, CAE, manufacturing, or marketing capabilities as live services that are operable over the Internet. These services are made available through a service marketplace. Product developers, small or large, can subscribe to and flexibly inter-relate these services to embody a distributed product development organization, while simultaneously creating system models that allow the prediction and analysis of integrated product performance. It is hypothesized that product development services will become commodities, much like many component-level products are today. It will be possible to rapidly interchange equivalent design service providers so that the development of the product and the definition of the product development organization become part of the same process. Computer-aided design tools will evolve to facilitate the publishing of live design services. A research prototype system called DOME is used to illustrate the concept and a pilot study with Ford Motor Company is used in a preliminary assessment of the vision.