Towards a Formalization of Collaboration Entities to Manage Conflicts Appearing in Cooperative Product Design

Abstract

The growing competitive pressure as well as the increase in the product and process complexity requires new organisational concepts for product development. Collaborative design refers to the coming together of diverse interests and people to achieve a common purpose that is developing a product via interactions, information and knowledge sharing, with a certain level of coordination of the various activities. The global purpose of our work is to propose a complete framework to manage collaborative knowledge in collaborative design. Our first goal is to identify the collaborative knowledge inherent to the design activities and then to formalise it in generic models in order to develop some tools able to support this collaborative knowledge. This article will focus on knowledge identification and formalisation. We first define the knowledge existing in collaborative design while targeting the components building this knowledge. To illustrate our approach, our investigations will be focus on conflicting situations occurring in collaborative design activities. Parallels we introduce the notion of collaboration entity as a mean to support and formalise this collaborative knowledge. These entities are defined as collections of collaborative knowledge. They are generic and reusable in many typical scenarios. In the case of the scenario "manage a conflict", two main entities are identified: popularization entity, and mediation entity. Keywords: Collaborative Design, Collaborative Knowledge, Popularization Entity, Conflict Management. 475 S. Tichkiewitch and D. Brissaud (eds.), Methods and Tools for Cooperative and Integrated Design, 475-486.