Towards a structured approach to the definition of indicators for collaborative activities in engineering design

The work reported here relates to the need for collaborative platforms for sharing knowledge in engineering design. Such platforms often integrate different indicators for describing or measuring the characteristics of current or past activities in order to improve collaboration. These collaboration indicators are intended to promote the interaction between the users of those platforms, and to provide engineers with different forms of awareness. In this paper, the issue of defining a structured approach for building a consistent set of indicators for an efficient collaborative platform in engineering design is investigated. A possible classification for these indicators is put forward and is based on several dimensions, such as the social aspects. This classification provides a broad view of indicator requirements, through grid, making it possible both to analyse existing indicators and to characterise users’ needs in order to define new ones. The proposed classification is tested in two different compani...