Abstract Due to the increasing complexity of technical products and the decrease in product development time ("time to market") the urgent need for the optimisation of cross-skill engineering collaboration demands short-term solutions. In this paper we will therefore introduce an approach to federate the established engineering tools and processes on the basis of commonly shared engineering models rather than to integrate or to harmonize them in a long-term and highly complex development process. The underlying methodology for this service oriented knowledge sharing concept will be based on a semantically enriched, formal notation for the definition of the necessary data mapping & linking between the different engineering models. Besides an introduction to this new collaboration approach this presentation will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art CA technology and artificial intelligence technologies capable to contribute to the conceptual design of a short-term solution and point out the individual shortcomings, that are currently addressed by an ongoing project at PROSTEP in collaboration with the Université Claude Bernard Lyon and the Université Louis Pasteur Strasbourg (France). The paper includes examples with the first implementation of free form deformation algorithms, artificial neuronal networks and functional DMU.