Abstract
How to achieve engineering collaboration among diverse engineering activities is one of the key topics in manufacturing fields nowadays. The infrastructure for collaborative engineering is essential, and it can be realized by information technologies and intelligent engineering applications in digital environments. Digital Manufacturing is a technology to facilitate effective product developments and agile productions by computer models representing the physical and logical schema and the behavior of real manufacturing systems including products, processes and factories. A digital factory as a well-designed and integrated digital environment is incorporated in it. In this paper, digital manufacturing is recommended as a good strategy for collaborative engineering, especially in product developments and productions. By business process analysis and some case studies, we suggested sophisticated digital models are very useful to concurrent and collaborative engineering. It is expected that digital manufacturing is a very good strategy for achieving dramatic time and cost savings in many engineering activities of many manufacturing industries, including machinery, automotive and shipbuilding.