Conflict Management in Engineering Design: Industrial Evidence from CO Med Software
Muriel Lombard, Bertrand Rose · 2005
In a context of increasingly demanding performances, different product design actors are invited to collaborate narrowly in order to conclude their project. These increasingly specific requirements in precise domains lead to a global increase of the actors' knowledge patrimony. The interaction of various types of knowledge during the collaboration phases highlighted the need for structuring this inheritance so as to be able to re-use it advisedly throughout the product life cycle, thus preventing possible conflicts. The multiplicity of expertises and viewpoints of the actors involved in the design project is an amplification factor of these conflicts. In this context, we propose a solution to manage and solve conflicts within design problems. Based on a framework for collaborative products design specifically dedicated to conflicts handling we propose a software infrastructure to allow the various conflict implied actors to structure their exchanges and to capitalize the evoked solutions with a reuse purpose in other projects: the CO MED (COllaborative COnflict Management in Engineering Design) application. We validate this one on an industrial case resulting from the design of a converter at Alstom Power Conversion Nancy.