Nowadays companies have to face the rapid evolution of their competitive environment. In the field of design, project managers are aware of both the impact of the designers' competencies on the project performance and of the requirement for a fast development of these competencies. However, they have difficulties in updating competency reference banks and then, in correctly matching the available competencies and missions that have to be performed. This issue of competence management mainly concerns competency allocation and project team building. In research literature, numerous research works suffer from poor competence modelling. Even if some authors have linked competence with work situation, there is often a lack of documentation concerning knowledge capturing about a designer's work situation which would help managers characterise competency. In this paper, we present the architecture of a novel approach based on the traceability of design activities which aims at assisting competency characterisation through qualitative features of the work situation in which this competency is activated. #

Human-centered Industrial Engineering is probably the major challenge that both the industrial and academic communities have to take up. This interdisciplinary problem relies on organizational, technological, economic and human issues. Sociotechnical systems management has to define an appropriate organization to create synergy between competencies, processes, products and technologies, at different levels within the company (individual, group, company) or between companies. Competency and knowledge are becoming key-notions that need to be integrated in systems management engineering. The point is that there exists no competency model, relevant to specify coherent socio-technical systems management. This paper contributes to clarify the notion of competency and presents a global cognitive model of competency working based on both a systemic approach and an action theory. This model represents the major cognitive resources and processes along with their interactions, according to an internal point of view of competency. The aims of this modeling are to understand how a complex system, i.e. competency, works and to focus on the articulation between knowledge and competency. An extension of this model concerns competency dynamics and will be published later. The validation of this model is achieved in the framework of a research contract with a French car enterprise, in a specific field of car engineering processes. The final aims of our research works are about the design of a management device of the engineering competency system.

To cite this version:Eric Bonjour, Samuel Deniaud, Maryvonne Dulmet, Ghassen Harmel. A fuzzy method for propagating functional architecture constraints to physical architecture.. Journal of Mechanical Design, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2009, 131 (6) The product domains are mainly composed of three sub domains [1], which are:• Customer expectations and life-cycle requirements,• Functions which are arranged in the functional architecture,• Sub-systems and components which are arranged in the physical (or design) architecture.These domains form different views of the product at different levels of abstraction. Requirements correspond to external functions and constraints that the product has to satisfy. These requirements are fulfilled through the realization of the system functions that in turn are realized by the integration of different product components.In the engineering design field, researchers have developed architecting rules and methods to map functions to physical components [2][3][4][5][6]. Other approaches view the functional model of a system as being described by an abstract functional decomposition that may, but does not need to, have a direct mapping onto physical decomposition of assemblies and subassemblies [7]. Ulrich [3] defines product architectures as "the scheme by which the function of a product is allocated to physical components." A key feature of product architecture is the degree to which it is modular or integrative [8]. In modular architectures, functional models of the product map one-to-one to its physical components. On the other hand, in integrative architectures "several functional elements are each implemented by more than one component, and several components each implement more than one functional element" [3]. In real design situations, designers have to make a trade-off between modular and integral architectures.Hence, many products are hybrid [9]. Their architectures are not fully modular or integral and lie somewhere between the two extremes. The above definitions are mainly based on the functionality of a module. There is another common way of defining a module by only focusing on interactions between elements. Baldwin and Clark [4] define a module as "a unit whose structural elements are powerfully connected among themselves and relatively weakly connected to elements in other units". Browning [8] defines integrative elements as interacting with all of the modules without belonging to any module.Research, concerning platform-based product development and product family design [10][11][12][13][14][15][16], has received huge interest over the last decade since it aims at providing methods to identify common modules and generate product variants with distinctive modules (commonality vs variety). According to [10], a non-unique component is defined as a component that is present in at least two products in a product family. It can be either common between the products sharing this component or variant across products.Overviews of current research status on th...