Collaborative Engineering Projects Research Articles

MEET THIS YEAR’S C2I FINALISTS

Now in its sixth year, The Engineer’s Collaborate To Innovate Awards celebrates the UK’s most inspiring collaborative engineering projects. Shortlisted projects this year address challenges in fields ranging from space flight to food production.

Meet This Year's C2I Finalists

Now in its fifth year The Engineer's Collaborate To Innovate Awards celebrates some of the UK's most inspiring collaborative engineering projects. Shortlisted projects this year range from innovations in renewable energy and EV battery technology through to breakthroughs in additive manufacturing and the development of potentially life-saving medical equipment.

COLLABORATE TO INNOVATE 2020 AWARDS ARE OPEN ENTRIES

We are excited to announce the launch of the 2020 Collaborate to Innovate Awards (C2I 2020), The Engineer's annual search for the UK's most innovative, collaborative engineering projects.

Issues in distributed Engineering of SMEs over the Collaboration Life Cycle

Abstract Collaboration in product development has played an increasingly important role in the past decades. However, distributed engineering creates a wide variety of challenges that, in some cases, are highly context dependent. In Germany, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role to the economy and engage in many collaborative engineering projects. So far, it remains a practical challenge to design a joint engineering environment that is not well-assisted by the science community. In addition, collaborations evolve over time. This study examines problem fields in collaborative engineering of SMEs and presents the collaboration life cycle (CLC) framework. This framework aims at classifying and contextualizing different problem domains within the greater context of a collaborative partnership. Therefore, we have conducted an interview study with industry experts regarding challenges in distributed engineering with SMEs and validated the results through an industry workshop. We argue that a high-level perspective on collaboration with different life-cycle phases in conjunction with the description of practical problem fields can assist in understanding collaboration in distributed design better. Going forward, the findings provide the base for ongoing research in a project that aims to make the maturity level of any distributed engineering environment assessable and provides guidance for improvements.

Meet this Year’s C2I Finalists

Now in its fourth year The Engineer’s Collaborate To Innovate Awards celebrates the UK’s most inspiring collaborative engineering projects. Shortlisted finalists this year ranged from innovations in cancer treatment to new production methods for the nuclear sector

A world first in collaborative cross-discipline agriculture and engineering education project

Digital farm project is an international collaborative engineering project for engineers as well as for students. This paper aims to provide the steps to be followed to draw up a successful action plan. To conduct this type of project, it is imperative to proceed in stages, have expert human resources in the field, and possess appropriate and efficient software with perfect control over it. It is also advisable to start with a multi-site project in a critical size before embarking on a project involving a hundred users. Finally, it is essential to have a network of trusted international partners with required skills in the field.

Management of Knowledge Sources Supported by Domain Ontologies: Building and Construction Case Studys

SummaryThis paper introduces a novel conceptual framework to support the creation of knowledge representations based on enriched semantic vectors, using the classical vector space model approach extended with ontological support. This work is focused on collaborative engineering projects where knowledge plays a key role in the process. Collaboration is the arena, engineering projects are the target and knowledge is the currency used to provide harmony into the arena since it can potentially support innovation and, hence, a successful collaboration. The test bed for the assessment of the approach comes from the Building and Construction sector, which is challenged with significant problems for exchanging, sharing and integrating information among actors. Semantic gaps or lack of meaning definition at the conceptual and technical levels, for example, are problems fundamentally originated through the employment of representations to map the ‘world’ into models in an endeavour to anticipate other actors’ views, vocabulary and even motivations. One of the primary research challenges addressed in this work relates to the process of formalization and representation of document contents, where most existing approaches are limited and only take into account the explicit, word‐based information in the document. The research described in this paper explores how traditional knowledge representations can be enriched through incorporation of implicit information derived from the complex relationships (semantic associations) modelled by domain ontologies with the addition of information presented in documents, by providing a baseline for facilitating knowledge interpretation and sharing between humans and machines. Preliminary results were collected using a clustering algorithm for document classification, which indicates that the proposed approach does improve the precision and recall of classifications. Future work and open issues are also discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Facilitating knowledge sharing and reuse in building and construction domain: an ontology-based approach

This paper brings a contribution focused on collaborative engineering projects where knowledge plays a key role in the process. Collaboration is the arena, engineering projects are the target, knowledge is the currency used to provide harmony into the arena since it can potentially support innovation and, hence, a successful collaboration. The building and construction domain is challenged with significant problems for exchanging, sharing and integrating information between actors. For example, semantic gaps or lack of meaning definition at the conceptual and technical level, are problems fundamentally created through the employment of representations to map the `world' into models in an endeavour to anticipate different actors' views, vocabulary, and objectives. One of the primary research challenges addressed in this work is the process of formalization and representation of document content, where most existing approaches are limited in their capability and only take into account the explicit, word-based information in the document. The research described in this paper explores how traditional knowledge representations can be enriched by incorporation of implicit information derived from the complex relationships (the Semantic Associations) modelled by domain ontologies combined with the information presented in documents, thereby providing a baseline for facilitating knowledge interpretation and sharing between humans and machines. The paper introduces a novel conceptual framework for representation of knowledge sources, where each knowledge source is semantically represented (within its domain of use) by a Semantic Vector. This work contributes to the enrichment of Semantic Vectors, using the classical vector space model approach extended with ontological support, employing ontology concepts and their relations in the enrichment process. The test bed for the assessment of the approach is the Building and Construction industry, using an appropriate B&C domain Ontology. Preliminary results were collected using a clustering algorithm for document classification, which indicates that the proposed approach does improve the precision and recall of classifications. Future work and open issues are also discussed.