“…In turn, the collaborative product development calls for the integration of Web-based services and collaboration across companies and their partners, as well as among different functional departments within a company [7]. As pointed out in [8,9], for geographically dispersed manufacturing partners, including customers, manufacturers, and suppliers, to achieve the satisfaction of the whole, it is imperative in practice to synchronize various Web-based applications within a coherent framework and to enable the unified information management of product lifecycle concerns over the Internet. In this regard, this paper develops a Web-based configure-to-order platform, with a particular application to injection molded parts, for collaborative customized product development.…”