Muriel Lombard

Towards a Formalization of Collaboration Entities to Manage Conflicts Appearing in Cooperative Product Design

The growing competitive pressure as well as the increase in the product and process complexity requires new organisational concepts for product development. Collaborative design refers to the coming together of diverse interests and people to achieve a common purpose that is developing a product via interactions, information and knowledge sharing, with a certain level of coordination of the various activities. The global purpose of our work is to propose a complete framework to manage collaborative knowledge in collaborative design. Our first goal is to identify the collaborative knowledge inherent to the design activities and then to formalise it in generic models in order to develop some tools able to support this collaborative knowledge. This article will focus on knowledge identification and formalisation. We first define the knowledge existing in collaborative design while targeting the components building this knowledge. To illustrate our approach, our investigations will be focus on conflicting situations occurring in collaborative design activities. Parallels we introduce the notion of collaboration entity as a mean to support and formalise this collaborative knowledge. These entities are defined as collections of collaborative knowledge. They are generic and reusable in many typical scenarios. In the case of the scenario “manage a conflict”, two main entities are identified: popularization entity, and mediation entity.

Management of Engineering Design Process in Collaborative Situation

Product development cycles are greatly shortened and subjected to a growing competitive pressure. In parallel, product and process complexities are increasing. This situation requires new organizational concepts in order to satisfy evolutionary market demand. The various design actors, provided with diverse expertise and culture, are therefore invited to collaborate more closely, in order to perform an effective product design. It is then, that the collaborative design process re-groups actors which have to achieve a common objective: develop a product via interactions, information and knowledge sharing, along with a certain level of co-ordination of the various activities. This paper will show how organization and co-ordination of projects are possible, thanks to the use of design environments, which are adapted to each design context. We will focus particularly on the study of various collaborative forms and collaborative knowledge to manage design environments.

A process model based methodology to support conflict management

Abstract The product design development has increasingly become a collaborative process. Conflicts often appear in the design process due to multi-actors interactions. Therefore, a critical element of collaborative design would be conflict situations resolution. In this paper, a methodology, based on a process model, is proposed to support conflict management. This methodology deals mainly with the conflict resolution team identification and the solution impact evaluation issues. The proposed process model allows the design process traceability and the data dependencies network identification; which making it be possible to identify the conflict resolution actors as well as to evaluate the selected solution impact.

DESIGN IN COLLABORATION: EXISTING TRENDS AND APPLICATION TO THE CASE OF CONFLICT HANDLING WITH CO2MED SOFTWARE

Abstract New Organizational frameworks for companies dealing with product development are required for the new market rules as much as for the rising pressure and complexity in product and process development. Thus, the new stake is to examine new methods of leading the design activities. We examine tools and trends existing in collaborative design today and propose a repository and its software implementation for the most constrained case of collaboration in design: collaborative conflict handling.

Contribution of Fuzzy Logic to Modelling Expertise in Intelligent Manufacturing Process Planning Systems

Abstract This paper aims at describing how fuzzy logic can be used to model process planning expertise in an integrated design context. The presented approach is AI-based : process planning rules do not have the same importance in every case, and this importance depends on the context related to the given problem. This context is expressed through rules that are often imprecise, as they are strongly related to know-how, experience..... It is this context modelling that can handle fuzzy logic concepts through expert rules dynamic weighting.