| Collaboration among members of a team with different expertise is the only way to accomplish large and complex design projects having optimal solutions in short lead time. Modeling and maintaining the design context for a collaborative design process posts a challenge for developing an intelligent, flexible and robust supporting system that should be able to create, capture, share, and retain product data across an enterprise with the goal of optimal solutions in a short lead time with minimum cost. The lack of a collaborative design support can lead to unexpected conflicts, time-consuming iteration, or loss of optimal design solutions.; This dissertation focuses on a model for collaborative design context maintenance and service, and on implementation of a Design Collaboration Server (DCS). An Object-Oriented model, the Issue-driven Design Collaboration Model (IDCM), is introduced to depict and maintain the full view of design context from three aspects: design process tracking and representation, design belief and reason maintenance, and product representation. The IDCM represents the non-monotonic, open-ended and ill-structured design process by a set of elaborated objects and associations which contain sufficient data and rationales to support process collaboration, design space consistency maintenance, and design reuse.; The proposed solution utilizes a distributed architecture containing an IDCM-based DCS and a set of domain agents. A Design Communication Language (DCL) is introduced to serve as the communication between the DCS and the domain agent. A DCS prototype is implemented on Java platform. |
