Improving Collaborative Design Tools in Automotive Industry: A Case Study

This paper presents a case study about improvements of collaborative design tools in the automotive industry. The objective is to propose some specifications for the development of a particular information system. This system, integrated into the designers' CAD environment, shall support a method to integrate customer requirements into the design process. The problem of building up a project memory, in order to keep track of the requirements and their evolution (situated in their initial context) is also taken into consideration. The investigation shows the importance to find connections between different categories of agents, each of them having different rationales, objectives, representations, languages or tools. The results presented in this paper are the outcome of a field research carried out in a huge car manufacturer, in engineering design teams.