Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
introduction
for a mutual understanding and collaboration
between domain expert team members.
In the following will be explained the speci-
ficity of human resources interaction, in the new
context of the collaborative distributed design
process for better understand the need for building
such environment. When a product is designed
through the collective and joint efforts of many
designers, the design process can be called as
collaborative design. This work has to be done
by taking into consideration the product lifecycle
processes by including those dispersed functions
such as design, manufacturing, assembly, test,
quality and purchasing as well as those from
suppliers and customers.
The main goals of such a collaborative design
team might include optimizing the mechanical
function of the product, minimizing the production
or assembly costs, or ensuring that the product
can be easily and economically serviced and
maintained etc. Since a collaborative design team
often works in parallels and independently using
different engineering tools distributed in separate
locations, even across various time zones around
the world, the resulting design process may then
be called distributed collaborative design.
Johansen used time-space 2D matrix to ex-
amine cooperative works (Johansen, 1998). The
matrix categorizes collaboration into synchronous
and asynchronous patterns, shown as Figure 1.
This space-time matrix cannot fully represent
the emerging collaboration trends. For example,
collaboration may happen among different
geographically dispersed companies, or within
the same company but between two distributed
divisions. Here we extend the matrix to a three-
dimensional time-location-group space, defined
as O (T, L, G) to describe when, where and who
are collaborating (Chen et al, 2005).
Compared to the Johansen's time-space matrix,
which is a very useful and concise reference to
the particular design circumstance, the proposed
3D time-location-group matrix not only looks at
whether participants are in the same place, but
the specificity of collaborative
distributed design
The product development process has changed dra-
matically in the last time because of the progresses
in the information and communication technology
field. Nowadays, the product development is a
result of a collaborative design process in network
(Shpitalni, Guttman, & Bossin, 2005). Integrated
product and processes development supposes to
consider all the knowledge about the product
lifecycle from the beginning of product design
stage, by integrating the user requirements, with
the quality, terms and costs constraints (Draghici,
1999), (Usher, Roy & Parsaei, 2005). Therefore,
we can talk about the whole product lifecycle
integration and management (Stark, 2005). The
design of successful and sustainable products is
increasingly linked to mastering the challenge of
the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of
modern products in an integrated fashion from
the very earliest phases of product development.
In the same time, many product development
projects require cooperation between research
teams with different competence, which can
be also, geographical distributed. When such a
project/product team is set up, all the require
knowledge must be considered to solve a certain
design problem in a collaborative environment.
Design engineers are increasingly confronted with
the need to master several different engineering
disciplines in order to get a sufficient understand-
ing of a product or service. Competence in the
major aspects of the whole product lifecycle is a
key element of the skills they require to be able
to conceive a product design that fulfils the re-
quirements of all the different actors involved in
the product's lifecycle as well as the constraints
imposed by their individual environments. Like-
wise, engineering teams are getting increasingly
interdisciplinary, and thus there is a strong demand
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