Collaborative Design: From Concept to Application

Collaborative work invests product design process to integrate as soon as possible all the partners and all necessary information in order to improve quality delay and costs. Design is then defined as collaborative and can be optimized by allowing upstream integration of data, resources and knowledge. In this context, CAD model becomes a digital mock-up (DMU) which is at the centre of communication and interaction between all the actors of the project. Thus, collaborative work software and hardware solutions come out to manage data, design process, and by extension the entire product lifecycle. We believe then in a PLM solution (product lifecycle management) that integrates product, process and resources, and acting as a framework for an efficient collaboration. Unfortunately, only the DMU is concretized from this ideal. Moreover, the tools are far from being operational, through lack of methodology, and the DMU is only used as a basis far data conference. Actual collaborative design is reduced to asynchronous data exchanges through PDM, even if some people prefer to speak about "sharing" since the product is a mutual creation. However, collaborative design has to allow cooperative work even in the early stages of design, despite of opposition between sharing and properties. The scope of this paper is to propose a state-of-the-art in the field of collaborative work applied to product design. We then show how actual tools, from CAD/CAM to PLM, can be used in a case study of a prime manufacturer and subcontractor co-design. We end by introducing a working methodology to succeed in collaborative design use and implementation