A collaborative engineering design data repository

Collaborative engineering design has the enormous potential to improve both the quality and timeliness of the design of products and processes. Unfortunately, design teams tend not to work at their full potential because of difficulties in communicating design ideas and artifacts and coordinating the activities of the team members. Recently, several types of collaboration systems have become available that provide either a set of real-time communication tools or a repository wherein "files" associated with a design can be stored and managed. The major drawback with these latter approaches is that the important "facts" are often lost within the files, leading to lost or ambiguous information. To overcome this, a new type of software system that allows design teams to communicate and coordinate at the "fact" level is described. After a description of the design and implementation of such a system, it is shown via a case study that use of such a fact-based system can significantly improve the collaborative engineering process.