Design of IT-Collaboration-Platforms with Fuzzy Logic

Globalization and interdisciplinarity are current trends in engineering fields, nevertheless such engineering projects, implying different companies, cultures and disciplines are complex and require interaction and communication between the people involved. Collaboration-platforms are instruments to lead successfully distributed, multi-disciplinary projects. However designing an appropriate platform can be difficult and influenced by many factors. That is why this work proposes to classify engineering projects with the help of these influencing factors using the fuzzy set theory. After building the sets, an empirical research has been made to establish fuzzy rules between the factors and chosen IT-functionalities, which permit to design an appropriate IT-Platform to support communication, information, coordination and collaboration processes. To verify the methodology, it has been applied to 2 industrial projects, what points out the barriers of this system.