Virtual Engineering

Virtual Engineering refers to the scenario where several independent partners perform product development or production engineering in co-operation - that is, engineering in a virtual enterprise. Similarly to the related concept "concurrent engineering", virtual engineering must cover all life-cycle stages and issues of a product. However, virtual engineering recognises explicitly the fundamental differences between the life-cycle viewpoints of a product, and aims at solutions that can work on the basis of distributed heterogeneous information. In particular, it recognises the central position of shared ontologies as a basis of integration. This position paper outlines the industrial and research challenges of virtual engineering, some major methodologies that contribute to it, and the ongoing work at Fraunhofer-IGD and HUT.