Effective information sharing and decision coordination are vital to collaborative product development and integrated manufacturing. However, typical special-purpose CAE systems tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, and typical integrated CAE systems tend to limit flexibility and process innovation. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project strikes a balance between these undesirable extremes by supporting reconfigurable exchange of engineering knowledge among special-purpose CAE systems. SHADE's approach has three main components: a shared knowledge representation (language and domain-specific vocabulary), protocols supporting information exchange for change notification and subscription, and facilitation services for content-directed routing and intelligent matching of information consumers and producers. 1 Introduction At the heart of effective concurrent engineering is communication. In product development, something is always changing-perhaps a design requireme...

Information sharing and decision coordination are central problems for large-scale product development. This paper proposes a framework for supporting a knowledge medium [32]: a computational environment in which explicitly represented knowledge serves as a communication medium among people and their programs. The framework is designed to support information sharing and coordinated communication among members of a product development organization, particularly for the tasks of design knowledge capture, dynamic notification of design changes, and active management of design dependencies. The proposed technology consists of a shared knowledge representation (language and vocabulary), protocols for foreign data encapsulation and posting to the shared environment, and mechanisms for content-directed routing of posted information to interested parties via subscription and notification services. A range of possible applications can be explored in this framework, depending on the ...

Concurrent Engineering (CE) tools are intended to increase the concurrency of multidisciplinary design by integrating various enabling technologies such as computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, group decision support systems, expert systems, and communication networks. If the long term viability of CE depends on effectively developing and deploying CE tools, the assumptions about how CE design tasks are most successfully performed and the roles of tools in facilitating that work should be carefully reviewed. This paper identifies the human factors assumptions made by the CE tool development community and compares them to conclusions drawn from existing literature on the role of technologies in performing technical work. This comparison suggests that the assumptions made by the CE tool development community are likely to inhibit CE tools from successfully enabling the CE process. Recommendations for remedying this state of affairs are offered in the form of restated assumptions that are consistent with documented behaviors of people using similar technologies and potential development strategies for CE tool developers.

The Palo Alto Collaborative Testbed (PACT) is a laboratory for joint experimentation in computer-aided concurrent engineering being pursued by research groups at Stanford University, Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard, and Enterprise Integration Technologies. The current prototype integrates four preexisting concurrent engineering systems into a common framework. Each individual system is used to model different aspects of a small robotic manipulator, and to reason about them from a different engineering perspective (dynamics, digital electronics, and software). The systems interact via knowledge-based communication languages and services. Initial PACT experiments have explored engineering knowledge exchange in the context of a distributed simulation and simple incremental redesign scenario. This paper describes the nature of these experiments, the technology underlying them, and the results produced. This work was partially supported by DARPA prime contract DAAA15-91-C-0104 through L...