Software architecture to facilitate automated message recording and context annotation

The complexities of product engineering frequently require teams of agents, both human and digital, working together to take a product through its life-cycle. Increasingly, manufacturers, designers and project planners belong to different design teams, in different corporate organizations in a supply network, separated by large geographic distances. This paper describes the software architecture of the Collaborative Design Studio environment we are developing to support Networked Engineering. We provide the framework enabling communications exchanged during design and manufacturing activities to be annotated with design context information and archived for future reference. We present an XML-based message model to encapsulate relationships between design context and designers' communications. As a proof-of-concept, are creating a Networked Engineering Environment with integrated email, instant messaging, collaborative work, text-editing and CAD/CAM packages.