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

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 fine-grained data access control at both the server and client sides, thus securing different levels of selective design information dissemination for intellectual property protection purposes. The consideration of time and value-adding activity with roles, policy delegation relation in a distributed context, and fine-grained control at dataset level in the model is to adhere to the general least privilege principle in access control.