Concurrent Engineering in Research Projects to Support Information Content Management in a Collective Way

Abstract

Innovation has become a factor of competition. In order to increase the production of new knowledge, Concurrent Engineering (CE) could be applied to research activities by improving efficiency and reliability in the communication between the researchers. In the same way, research activities could also profit from approaches such as quality management and knowledge management. To this end, in this article, within a CE integrated team, research activities are analyzed in depth using a sociological study. Approaches harnessing the bibliographical work done by researchers are proposed -ANITA (ANnotation tool for Industrial TeAms) and MICA-Graph. Their associated communication tools are developed and undergo experimentation. The intention is to facilitate research activities by supporting information artifacts (textual and graphical such as sketches). These new and ergonomic groupware prototypes working on PC networks tend to be used to control two kinds of artifact: (1) Semi Structured Information (e.g., reports, etc.) thanks to the ANITA functions, that are based on the attribution of points of view and annotations on artifacts, and (2) Non Structured Information (such as mail, dialogues, etc.), thanks to the MICA-Graph approach, which is intended to support the exchange of messages that concern common resolution of research problems within CE-integrated teams and to capitalize relevant knowledge. It also provides facilities to structure and archive knowledge learned during this process owing to new methods of design sketch retrieval. For both approaches, the main feedback utilized involves manufacturing knowledge in the EADS industrial environment.

Markup in Engineering Design: A Discourse

“…The experiments show that the hybrid approach outperforms both purely statistical and purely knowledge-based systems. Vargas-Vera et al present an annotation tool that provides both automated and semi-automated support for marking up Web pages with semantic contents [49].…”

“…Finally, the information can be retrieved at an abstract and "semantic" level, rather than the purely syntactic keyword matching level. The shared ontology is also used in the method proposed by Gardoni [52], and Frank and Gardoni [53], called ANnotation tool for Industrial TeAms (ANITA). The ANITA uses the shared ontology to index documents and parts of documents through manual annotation.…”

Designing a Reverse Supply Chain Inventory Model with Remanufacturing Process

“…How to realize design resources share and optimization allocation in a high efficiency is the key to short the design time and cost. Aiming to the drawbacks of traditional design modes, some distributed network collaboration design technologies such as Concurrent Engineering (CE) [1], Cloud Computing (CC) [2] and Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) [3] try to address above problems in design process by design resources virtualization, knowledge reuse , reasonable design process model and high efficiency design task scheduling. It has become a widely attention problem to facilitating product design by scheduling reasonable design resources to finish complicate product design task with low cost and short time.…”

Team Formation in Concurrent Engineering Using Group Technology (GT) Concepts

“…This indicates that CE is by large a managerial challenge [6,7]. A successful CE application requires efficient and flexible formation and organization of design teams [3,[7][8][9][10] and utilization of the most advanced technology [11][12][13]. This aspect is of a particular importance.…”