Abstract:

The purpose of this research is to identify how to better handle the new trends in collaborative production and to understand how to improve the efficiency of a virtual team. In order to achieve these goals, a collaborative platform was developed, for educational purposes. This platform, intends to simulate the entire product life cycle, in a virtual environment, combining the latest software tools available on the market. The collaborative product development platform is divided in 12 stages based on the product life cycle management (PLM) steps.

It starts from a market study that leads to the concept creation, reverse engineering and product design. The next phase involves virtual testing and virtual manufacturing for the previously designed product. After these simulations the platform leads to rapid prototyping (3D printing) an physical inspection of the 3D printed product. The final stages of the platform are marketing, client feedback, improvement and recycle.

In order to improve the collaborative working environment, augmented reality is applied for almost all the stages of the platform, starting from the "concept creation" to the "marketing" stage. The augmented reality used consists in 3D CAD models or other digital information superimposed over environment.
This collaborative platform is used by groups of students (which simulate a geographically dispersed virtual team) to develop new products using the PLM steps.

Keywords:

Collaborative Platform, Product Life cycle Management, Augmented Reality.