Collaborative Mechanical Engineering Design – Representation and Decision Issues

Until recently, the engineering design community has focused on addressing isolated engineering design tasks by developing systems such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), computer-aided engineering (CAE), or product data management (PDM). Each of these systems has been designed to assist the engineer in a specific task that required little if any cooperation with others. However, from the management of the requirements, through the design, manufacturing and production, to the customer relationship management, the execution of a product life cycle encompasses many steps where involved activities are tightly interrelated and dependent. Cooperative activities in a product life cycle first rely on information management. In each step of the process, there is a need to access, generate, change, and validate information. In this paper, we address the issue of cooperative activities in product design by modeling design information and relationships between the actors in the design process.