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The main difficulty associated with a collaborative design process is understanding the product data exchanged during design. Efficient and effective coordination of design activities relies on a thorough understanding of dependencies between shared product specifications throughout the entire development cycle. This paper explores the linkages between design process features and product specification dependencies, and suggests ways of identifying and managing specification dependencies to improve collaborative process performance. Using a UML 2 specification, we propose a process traceability tool to track the design process in an ongoing manner. Based on the information captured, dependencies between specifications involved in the tracked process are identified and inserted in a dependency network, maintained throughout the design process. A set of mechanisms is then proposed to qualify the identified dependencies. Extracting and qualifying specification dependencies could be useful in many design situations, for example, during an engineering change management process to assess impacts and study change feasibility, or during a conflict management process to assist designers in resolving conflicts and maintaining the coherence of the design process (knowing that change management is a tool to conduct conflict management). Special attention is paid to the conflict management process. By means of a case study, we show how the solution we propose can assist designers during the conflict management process.

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Due to the multi-actors interaction during collaborative design conflicts can be revealed from disagreements between designers about proposed designs. A critical element of collaborative design would be conflict resolution. This paper proposes a methodology to support designers during the process of conflict management; focusing mainly on identifying the conflict resolution team and evaluating the selected solution impact issues. The methodology is based on product data dependencies network which is composed of the handled data and the dependency links between them. Qualification concepts are introduced to manage these dependencies. In order to identify this network, a traceability model to track the design process is proposed.