Modelling collaborative knowledge to support engineering design project manager
Introduction
As complexity of engineering design processes continuously increases, designing has to integrate a great number of expertises based on collaboration between the different actors involved. In such a context, one purpose of design control is to define and to organise the system where the design transformation will take place, according to the needs for collaboration and design objectives. Hence, design control requires to understand design process context in order to adapt actors’ work when necessary. The design context is defined considering at the same time product and process aspects, but also the human, social and organisational aspects [1]. This paper focuses on collaboration between actors and more specifically on knowledge shared during the engineering design process. In order to manage successfully this collaborative process, such knowledge has to be taken into account in a model describing the design context. In Section 2, a formalisation of useful knowledge for collaborative design projects is proposed. It is essential to capitalise the knowledge produced during a given project in order to make it understandable and reusable. Section 3, suggests to integrate this knowledge in a model describing the design context. Such a representation of the design context will help project managers in identifying the added-value pieces of knowledge for the collaborative design and in assisting collaboration between actors. Section 4 presents a description of collaborative design process and how it could be managed based on the design environment concept. Finally an industrial case study is presented to illustrate the management of collaborative design process based on collaborative knowledge management.
Section snippets
Define collaborative knowledge
To increase design performances and consequently to satisfy customers’ requirements and expectations, the decision-makers (generally the project managers) have to adapt the designers’ work-context to the environment of the design process. The work-context of the actors will be improved and, when the project manager will be able to create effective working group according to the design objectives, human resources allocation will be more efficient. Girard et al. [2] have identified interactions
Modelling the design system
A great number of models describing the design system have been proposed [8], [9]. Generally speaking, these models integrate elements linked with the product, process and organisation but they do not take into account clearly human aspects. Rosenman and Gero [10] emphasise on the fact that design is above all a human activity and that is very difficult to understand all the designers’ actions very well. They show that the evolution of the product is the result of interactions between
Management of design process
At the beginning of the collaborative activity popularisation knowledge does not exist in the model (Fig. 3). The model could only integrate the in-depth knowledge of each actor. In this representation, the scientific and technological knowledge is linked to each actor thanks to the process model. Each actor will developed his own cognitive process to transform his scientific and technologic knowledge in tangible results on the product [11]. So, in-depth knowledge appears and could be
Application
As more and more stakeholders are involved in the integrated design process, more and more knowledge is used and shared and to develop products. Improvement of design process of enterprises supposes to control knowledge flow between actors during the collaboration phases. The information system is supposed to ensure the traceability of this knowledge by collecting the various data more or less structured and organised. One of the rare consensuses in the knowledge management domain is that
Conclusion
Product design today requires new interaction forms between the various stakeholders involved in this specific process. Nevertheless, the sharing of expertises, knowledge and know-how jointly linked with the development of communication means generate a great number of pieces of information and knowledge. It becomes necessary to ensure the traceability of such knowledge in a way that it can be re-used [31]. It is therefore necessary to manage and to capitalise relationships as well as knowledge
Acknowledgments
All the concepts presented in this paper are parts of the IPPOP project. It is a national project and its encourage by the industry and research ministry in the framework of the RNTL program. More information is available on http://ippop.laps.u-bordeaux1.fr/. We thank the staff of the design department of Alstom Power Conversion facilities (Nancy, France) for information about windmill stator design process that have allow us to illustrate pertinence of our research work.
V. Robin is an Associate Professor at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres d’Aquitaine and a member of the LAPS laboratory, University Bordeaux I (France). He received his Ph.D. degree in 2005. He is an engineer, graduated of the Polytechnic School of Tours in 2000 and he passed the aggregation of mechanics in 2001. His research interests include co-ordination of engineering design, human factors in design co-ordination and performance evaluation of collaborative design process.
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V. Robin is an Associate Professor at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres d’Aquitaine and a member of the LAPS laboratory, University Bordeaux I (France). He received his Ph.D. degree in 2005. He is an engineer, graduated of the Polytechnic School of Tours in 2000 and he passed the aggregation of mechanics in 2001. His research interests include co-ordination of engineering design, human factors in design co-ordination and performance evaluation of collaborative design process.
B. Rose is an Associate Professor at the LGECO Laboratory, INSA de Strasbourg (France) since 2005. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 at Nancy Automatic Control Research Centre. He is an engineer from Ecole Supérieure d’Informatique et Applications de Lorraine (Nancy, France) since 2001. He is working in the conflict handling management specifications in collaborative design.
Ph. Girard is a Professor at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres d’Aquitaine and a member of LAPS. After teaching at the University of Bordeaux I for 10 years, he started his research activity in 1993. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1999. His research interests include co-ordination of engineering design, product and process modelling, performance evaluation and development of multi-agent systems to assist designers. He has published more than 60 papers for conferences, journals and books. He is in charge of the “Engineering Design” research team at the LAPS laboratory, University of Bordeaux 1 (France).