Concurrent Engineering: Enabling Traceability and Mutual Understanding

Concurrent Engineering requires the cooperation of people coming from different phases of the engineering process. Traceability between the different views (products), which exist in such cross-functional teams, is essential for enabling mutual understanding. Moreover, the different views must be related to each other and must be presented in a suitable way to support finding and resolving of inconsistencies, conflicts, and different opportunities. We have developed and implemented a concurrent engineering environment, called PRO-ART, which is based on four main ideas: (1) record, use, and maintain the various products using formal product models; (2) capture the relationships between the products detected during process performance; (3) present the relations based on the ideas of the House of Quality; (4) provide a computer based environment, which hides the formal models and automates the recording of products and their interrelations. The recording and situated retrieval of the information is enabled by a repository which has been implemented using the deductive and object oriented knowledgebase system ConceptBase.