CROWD ENGINEERING - BRINGING FULL CLOUD CAD INTO THE LAB

Engineering and design of products is changing rapidly. Products become more complex and interconnected, engineers need to work in interdisciplinary, globally distributed, multinational teams. Many tools and services have been moved into the cloud, in private life but also at the workspace. Another probable game changer is the crowd sourcing approach to outsource work to a group of people. At universities students are taught to design products with conventional CAD tools and attend lectures about project management, use of product lifecycle management (PLM) or challenges and obstacles of distributed product development. With this in mind, the University of Kaiserslautern together with a partner university and an automobile company initiated a pilot project, where students have to organise the development process by themselves using a full cloud CAD software.