Formalisation of design rules to assist conflict detection in collaborative design

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The increasing competition in and complexity of product design require the collaboration of experts from different skills and from many disciplines who often work in distributed environments and do not use the same description for the same object. Every expert has his/her own formalisms and tools, so the integration and collaboration of expert tools have become a challenge to avoid design conflict along the product life cycle. The synchronisation of heterogeneous representations of products will be a major step to integrate expert activities. Current collaborative design environments do not support design collaboration effectively in terms of information and constraints capturing, exchange and integration. This paper proposes: a new constraint-based model to maintain complex relationships in multidisciplinary collaborative design; a metarule concept that controls the constraint network in the design process, leading to a new notification mechanism for presenting conflict to all corresponding actors; techniques that apply delta calculation and constraint verification during the synchronisation of the two models.