Virtual engineering

Virtual engineering refers to the scenario whre 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 engineerig" , virtual engineering must support the inclusion of all life-cycle issues of a product during its design. However, virtual engineering recognises explicitly the fundamental differences between the live-cycle viewpoints to aproduct, and aims at solutions t hat can work also on the basis of distributed heterogeneous informatio and systems. From the viewpoint of information technology, the research challenge of virtual engineering is to develop computational tools that support co-operation, information sharing, and co-ordination of activities for engineering teams. These tools must operate in a distributed, heterogeneous environment where direct data sharing by jointly used data repositories is impossible or impractical.