SUMMARY

Due to the continuing globalization, almost all complex products are designed through the interaction and collaboration among multiple participants, working on different elements of the design in distributed and collaborative settings. As the increasing amount of information and manufacturing resources are being shared in the context of global manufacturing, the challenge is how to enhance communication and collaboration in product development in distributed and collaborative settings. The objective of this research is to establish a framework for a new product development model, namely, cloud-based design and manufacturing (CBDM), which has the potential to enhance the sharing of information and resources across upstream design and downstream manufacturing enterprises. The research approach involves: (1) to understand the information flow and collaboration patterns in CBDM, a social network analysis (SNA) based approach is proposed; (2) to assess the potential economic benefits from CBDM, a cost estimation method is introduced based on Petri Nets (PN) and Activity-Based Costing (ABC). From a research perspective, the proposed research is expected to (1) complement qualitative methods in understanding the product development network structures, structural positions of individual participants, and their potential influences on communication and collaboration; (2) provide a deeper understanding of the cost drivers and value-added activities in CBDM. From an application perspective, CBDM may (1) help Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) run manufacturing operations more cost effectively by utilizing excessive manufacturing resources owned by large enterprises; and (2) enable large sized enterprises to develop and enhance their core competencies and innovation capabilities by crowd-sourcing labor-intensive tasks.