Awareness and workflow based coordination of networked co-operations in structural design

SUMMARY: Modern engineering projects in the application domain of structural design are organized as networked co-operations due to permanently enlarged competition pressure and a high degree of complexity while performing concurrent design activities. One of the major challenges of these networked co-operations constitutes the coordination of the activities of all involved participants. Recent off-the-shelf software systems, however, fail for coordinating these complex activities in this area. In the course of our research activities, we have developed two different directions for coordinating such projects: (1) a workflow-based concept regulating the activities by a global workflow model (University of Bochum) and (2) an awareness model that allows to perceive activities of other partners and to derive new activities mentally (University of Bonn). This paper describes a novel integration approach of these two models: according to the global workflow model, users can be informed such that they are enabled to detect potential inconsistencies while modeling activities at an early stage.

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