Collaborative project: Evolution of computer-aided design data completeness as management information

Abstract

Today, product design process is facing a market globalisation led by distributed teams. The international market context, in which industrial companies evolve, leads design teams to work in a large multidisciplinary collaborative context using collaborative practices. In this context, product design process is driven by the integration and optimisation of stakeholders’ collaboration. Thus, to facilitate collaborative steps, new management strategies are defined and new information systems can be used. To this end, we have focused our article on the topic of collaborative product design project management. We have underlined the necessity to use quantitative and non-intrusive indicators during the management of collaborative design phases besides subjective evaluations. Tracking these indicators is performed in parallel to the existing approaches in order to evaluate the performance of collaborative design project. Moreover, these indicators can show the impact of the collaboration steps on the design project evolution. The computation of proposed indicators is based on precise metrics which details the completeness of the computer-aided design model and its evolution depending on the used collaborative tools and the project milestones. This computation uses the importance of each computer-aided design model part and the transformation rate of each part of the computer-aided design model.