IMPACT LABORATORY IMPROVING MANUFACTURING PRODUCTIVITY WITH ADVANCED COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGY A Generic Collaborative Engineering Design Process Model for Conflict Management

Collaborative engineering design involves various stakeholders with different perspectives. The design process is relatively complex and difficult to handle. Various conflicts always happen among the design tasks and affect the design team performance. Therefore, to represent collaborative design process and capture the evolution of design perspectives in a structured way is critical to manage the design conflicts and improve the collaborative design productivity. This paper provides a generic design collaborative design process representation model based on a Socio-Technical design framework. This model has a topological format and adopts process analysis techniques from Petri Nets. By addressing both the technical and social aspects of collaborative design activities, it provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among design tasks and perspectives of different stakeholders. Based on this design process model, a methodology of detecting and handling the design conflicts is developed to support collaborative design coordination.