Enhancement of product development through product information mark-up language

摘要

In today's increasingly competitive environment, companies are experiencing growing pressures to reduce the product development lead-time to meet market expectations. The motivation of this research is to automate product development process and enhance product data management systems for capturing the critical information to support decision-making, thereby supporting responsive product development. In this research, a systematic approach based on the deployment of extensible mark-up language incorporated with object technology to form a novel interface between knowledge-based system and relational database system is proposed. The significance of this research is the provision of a cross-platform data exchange system that is able to facilitate the creation of a conducive product development environment to support design agility. A pilot implementation of an integrated system has been conducted in a Hong Kong-based toy manufacturer for examining the effectiveness of distributing information in heterogeneous environments and the capability of transforming data to useful information, which is vital for manufacturers in maintaining their competitiveness.