A Conflict Detection Approach for Collaborative Management of Product Interfaces

In complex products, maintaining subsystem consistency throughout the design process is often a time-consuming process of document exchange among cooperating functions. This paper describes a conflict management approach that lead to the computer-aided management of the product specification conflicts that happen due to the integration of subsystems. In order to define a framework, a systematic interface representation which proposes building generic interface schemes for subsystem connectivity representation is described. Based on this methodology, a functional architecture of the proposed conflict management method, along with generic exception taxonomy of conflicts is developed. The applicability of the proposed concepts is discussed through illustrative examples. The proposed methodology is intended to allow automatic detection and handling of interface connectivity errors throughout collaborative design processes. INTRODUCTION An important part of collaborative design is managing the consistency between the subsystems of a product. However, maintaining subsystem consistency throughout the design process is often done manually through a time-consuming process of document exchange among cooperating functions. Current literature proposes some computer-aided methods to identify various conflicts between a design and its requirements [1, 2]. In concurrent engineering, a large number of conflicts can happen when integrating systems with incompatible interfaces. So far the majority of conflict management research is devoted to that of process and design versus manufacturing; in this paper, we focus on the product specification conflicts that happen due to the integration of subsystems. Interface specifications defined for a subsystem may not fit other subsystems’ specifications interacting with it. Moreover, different groups designing different subsystems often have different perceptions regarding what might be the best design for interfaces, which may result in incompatible terminologies or sets of parameters to describe the interfaces. This inevitably results in technically inconsistent subsystem designs, which need to be addressed by conflict management methodologies. In complex products, establishing and managing the interfaces between subsystems is very challenging. Subsystems of such products are mostly developed by different design groups, sometimes not even from the same company. This makes it necessary to clearly define subsystem boundaries and the interfaces between them in order to ensure proper functionality in the final product. Currently, none of the existing conflict management methods deals well with subsystem interfaces. In order to define a conflict management framework, this paper considers a systematic interface representation proposed by Rahmani and Thomson [3]. This representation consists of using a generic interface scheme for subsystem connectivity representation. It is helpful for conflict detection because it allows building explicit and simple exception classification and helps to provide effective algorithms for detecting incompatibilities.