Intellectual Property Protection in Collaborative Design through Lean Information Modeling and Sharing

Abstract

Establishing efficient, effective, and trustworthy engineering collaboration while protecting intellectual property is vital to maintain organizational competence in today’s global business environment. In this paper, a lean information modeling and sharing framework is described to support engineering data security management in a peer-to-peer collaborative environment. It allows for selective and interoperable data sharing with fine-grained access control at both the server and client sides, thus securing different levels of design information dissemination for intellectual property protection purposes. The considerations of time and value-adding activity with roles, policy delegation relation in a distributed context, and fine-grained control at data set level in the model are to adhere to the general least privilege principle in access control. Heterogeneous design data are exchanged selectively through an eXtensible Markup Language common interface, which provides a neutral format to enhance data interoperability and prevents reverse engineering.