Collaboration is key!

Presents a multi‐agent system (MAS) for collaborative design in the construction sector. The system is intended to form a basis for integrating the often distributed cross‐functional activities that characterise collaborative design in construction. The MAS supports interaction and negotiation between the different agents that represent various participants that are usually engaged in a typical collaborative project design. The system is composed of different agents that provide services within the MAS environment. While some of the support services are provided by the agent platform, task agents that represent various functional disciplines undertake the real design activities. Describes details of the MAS, which simulates and demonstrates peer‐to‐peer interaction, communication and negotiation between the design agents in a collaborative design space. Also highlights important issues in MAS development and makes recommendations on how to improve collaborative design in construction using the MAS paradigm.

Product design tends to be more complex and needs the effective cooperation among multidisciplinary designers and engineers. An ideal product design environment, which is both collaborative and intelligent, will be much appreciated. Agent technology is an innovative and promising approach to implementing distributed systems and is becoming popular in various areas of computing in recent years. In this paper, the dynamic nature of collaborative design process and the representation of collaborative design knowledge are presented. In order to model constantly evolving design process and the rationales resulted from collaboration, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM), which extends traditional Product Data Model (PDM), and a constraint-based Collaborative Design Process Model (CDPM) are proposed. These are intended to facilitate the management and coordination of collaborative product design process and knowledge management. A design example is used to illustrate CDPM. While the system is being implemented, the architecture of our agent-based collaborative product design environment based on CPDM and CDPM is described.

In order to solve the consistency and integration about process and process data that is produced in digital product collaborative development, digital collaborative design process model is presented, by detailed analyzing the integration requirement of collaborative design process and data. Based on this model, the CAX/DFX tools which are used in collaborative design are distributed and granule encapsulated by Federal Intelligent Product EnviRonment(FIPER); collaborative design process data produced by CAX/DFX tools is encapsulated based on the logic of Product Data Management (PDM) system’s workflow and is published as Webservice. FIPER is used to realize the collaborative design process flow that uses data Webservice to data exchange between PDM and uses encapsulated CAX/DFX tools to realize the design function. An example which realizes the integration of process design flow of a part is presented at the end of this paper. The collaborative design process flow is used to organize the collaborative process planning and to encapsulate the collaborative design data with Webservice in this example. The realization of this example manifested that the digital collaborative design product model has good practicability and the method of encapsulation for CAX/DFX tools and data Webservice is feasibility.

The current interior design of commercial buildings is facing innovative challenges, requiring a balance between aesthetics, functionality, and economic benefits. The design industry faces challenges in interdisciplinary integration, lack of standardized processes, and limitations of traditional design methods in complex situations. Although virtual reality technology provides new solutions, its integration difficulty, cost, and operational complexity constrain its widespread application. This study introduces a digitally twin-based augmented reality (AR) collaborative indoor design framework, addressing the decomposition of spatial planning for the complexity inherent in design processes. Subsequently, contextual data in the indoor design process is structured into an indoor design knowledge graph to elucidate information transmission and iterative mechanisms during collaborative design, thereby enhancing the situational adaptability of AR collaborative design. Utilizing a root anchor-based collaborative approach, multiple designers engage in spatial design collaboration within the AR environment. Real-time knowledge and data facilitated by the design knowledge graph contribute to collaborative decision-making, ensuring the quality and efficiency of collaborative design. Finally, exemplified by a complex interior design project for a commercial space, an AR-based collaborative digital twin (DT) interior design system is established, validating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed methodology. Through this approach, designers can preview and modify designs in a virtual environment, ultimately reducing errors, shortening design cycles, lowering costs, and enhancing user satisfaction.

Collaboration is widely identified as a force for good, with a wide range of benefits attributed to it, but considerable variations exist in descriptions of exactly what constitutes collaboration and how it is undertaken in practice. In the face of this diversity it becomes difficult to understand how effectively the process of collaboration is being undertaken. In this research, value concept principles are adopted in an exploration of collaboration processes in order to derive a better understanding of how organisations establish new collaborations, and to gain insights into the situational factors and human behaviour that may lead to improved collaboration effectiveness. The research design featured a constructivist version of grounded theory used in conjunction with the complementary techniques of Situational Analysis. This design is particularly suited to the research context in which social processes feature prominently and in which the objectives include theory development. A topology of eight generic categories of process is presented in the findings as part of a central category that links temporal, behavioural and situational factors to collaboration outcomes. The identification of social capital and human capital as intermediate forms of value, located in individual actors and their social relationships, is used to highlight the importance of recognising and developing these soft capital forms, if more tangible physical and financial capital is to be generated. Collectively the data emphasise that organisations do not collaborate, people do. Collaboration is fundamentally a social rather than business process. Three dimensions of collaborative compatibility are discussed that recognise the importance of involving competent individuals that are socially compatible if relationships between potentially compatible organisations are to thrive. Organisational compatibility alone will not lead to effective collaboration. This study makes four contributions to existing knowledge. A 3-dimensional model of collaborative compatibility, interpreted in the context of a new typology of collaboration processes, extends existing collaboration theory with insights into the way collaboration relationships form and perform, and the way they are affected by individual and social factors. The recognition of latency in intermediate forms of value makes a contribution to a recognised shortfall in understanding of the temporal dimension of the value literature. In the third, a contribution is made to literature on coopetition and the coordination of inter-firm groups, through the recognition of effective practices in 3rd party brokering organisations. Finally, an incremental contribution is made to the extensive body of knowledge and learning literature through insights into the social factors driving knowledge transfer in inter-organisational groups, and the implications these have for organisational knowledge absorption. These four avenues each have practical implications for how organisations and policy makers plan initiatives to increase economic activity through inter-firm collaboration.

Efforts to use design rationale (DR) to improve design have been frustrated by difficulties in capturing such rationale in a format structured by a DR schema, such as PHI, QOC, or DRL. These difficulties disappear when rationale is captured as unstructured transcripts of communication among collaborating designers, but the lack of structure in such transcripts severely hinders retrieval. This problem can be solved by parsing transcripts of collaborative design using an argumentative, semantic grammar to produce PHI-structured DR. The ASGARD (Argumentative, Semantic Grammar for Analysis of Rationale for Design) software uses this technique to extract structured DR from transcripts of collaborative architectural design. Preliminary tests were made to see if ASGARD could successfully model and parse three collaborative design transcripts. Results of these tests suggest that this approach has promise for automating DR capture.

This paper reports preliminary results from a technique used to study inter and intra group information exchanges which occur in the conceptual stages of collaborative group design. In the early stages of conceptual design, there is little information to guide the designers and they find themselves groping to find pertinent information which may help them. In collaborative group design the members are able to pool in both their knowledge as well as knowlwdge from other groups. Currently there are no techniques, which exist, to help track this group information exchange. In this paper, we use the sense-making theory to guide us in assessing the information needs of the designers engaged in group collaborative design. In this study, the sense-making theory is described and adapted for applications in the engineering design domain. The analysis technique is a two step process. First the records are transcribed and labeled and then interpreted. The technique allows one to obtain a chronological map of the information seeking, helps obtained, and the decisions made. Results from the first design session show that during the early phases of group design, the most needs arose in establishing the knowledge base and in identifying the design process. There was a strong need for inter and intra group information exchange.

This investigation proposes the architecture for a collaborative assembly design to shorten the life cycle in product development stages. The architecture adopts STEP-based data representation and CAD feature extraction to enable the implementation of engineering change over the Internet. The collaborative design framework and design change propagation method, which are key to the proposed architecture, are discussed and implemented. The collaborative design approach can greatly shorten a product’s life cycle and improve the productivity of an enterprise.

In a product development process, it is crucial to understand and evaluate multiple and synergic aspects of systems such as performance, cost, reliability, and safety. These aspects are mainly considered during later stages of the design process. However, in order to improve the foundations for decision-making, this article presents methods that are intended to increase the engineering knowledge in the early design phases. In complex products, different systems from a multitude of engineering disciplines have to work tightly together. Collaborative design is described as a process where a product is designed through the collective and joint efforts of domain experts. A collaborative multidisciplinary design optimization process is therefore proposed in the conceptual design phase in order to increase the likelihood of more accurate decisions being taken early on. The performance of the presented framework is demonstrated in an industrial application to design aircraft systems in the conceptual phase.

The demand for teaching and learning collaborative design is probably greater than ever thanks to many influential parties highlighting creativity, collaboration and designing as necessary future skills. However, ‘good’ collaborative design necessitates a clear understanding of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘collaboration’, and of how an individual’s activities contribute to a team achieving a satisfactory design solution. This research aimed to develop a methodological approach to facilitate the analysis of collaborative interaction and design as equally meaningful and closely linked components, and to equally account for verbal and sketching activities. The developed extended linkography accounts for verbal and sketched design moves and utilises mobile gaze-tracker data to confirm visual attention and linkages between sketches. The method has potential importance for research on design cognition and collaboration, but also for analysing collaborative problem solving in other contexts. To illustrate the method, a case study of packaging design students collaboratively designing a sustainable Christmas basket is presented. The gaze data revealed that students’ collaborative engagement with ‘shared’ sketches differed: from the two proposals selected for 3D mock-up-building, one was developed concertedly and one as an aside of the shared process. The latter development appeared to be independent, seeking little input from team members. All in all, three qualitatively different interactive design processes were identified, and quantitative levels of collaboration were measured through Convergent and Divergent Collaboration Indexes. To determine the role of sketches for each of the students’ designing, gaze data was indispensable.

With the rapid development of economic globalization, more and more complex products have to be designed by the cooperation of the designers in different geographic locations. The effective sharing and deployment of collaborative design software are of great significance to enhance the capability of cooperative research and development of products. To solve the problem of software integration for collaborative design in the distributed and heterogeneous environment, a distributed software integration framework for collaborative product design based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was proposed. Based on Web Service technology, a collaborative design platform was built, which encapsulates the functions of Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), Product Data Management (PDM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to integrate distributed collaborative design software in heterogeneous environment.

The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) concept requires collaboration among clinicians both within the medical home clinic, and outside the clinic. As we redesign health information technology (HIT) to support transformation to the PCMH, we need to better understand these collaboration patterns. This study provides quantitative data describing these collaborations in order to facilitate the design of systems to allow for more efficient collaboration. Eighty-four clinicians in eight clinics identified their two most recent significant collaborators - one each within the clinic and in the medical neighborhood. They also identified the communication channels used in these collaborations. We used k-means clustering to identify communication patterns. Within the clinic, half of the primary care providers (PCPs) identified a care manager as their most recent collaborator. Outside specialists were their most common external collaborators. Ninety-two percent of the non-PCP participants identified PCP's as their most recent internal collaborators. The best model for communication channel usage (p < .0001) had six clusters. In general, inside communications were more informal but outside collaborations were more often formal written communications (faxes, letters) or the exchange of electronic health record progress notes. But there were exceptions to these patterns and in many cases multiple channels were used for the same collaboration. Systems design (and redesign) needs to focus on reducing communications load and increasing communication effectiveness while maintaining flexibility.

An analysis of 2074 papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded and published by different countries on various aspects of Japanese Encephalitis (JE) during 1991 to 2010 indicates that JE is a highly collaborative discipline as judged by the values of co-authorship index and the collaborative coefficient for different countries and different sub-fields. Of the total published papers, about two-third were written in collaboration. Of these, 214 (10 %) were written with local collaboration, 700 (34 %) with domestic collaboration and 478 (23 %) with international collaboration. Among all the countries, USA is the most important partner country for all the collaborating countries. The study indicates that the share of collaborative papers increased almost four times in 2001-2010 as compared to 1991-2000. USA, Japan, Taiwan and India produced about 70 % of domestically co-authored papers. USA also had the largest number (21 %) of the internationally co-authored articles. Among 17 highly collaborative institutions, the highest (six) are from India, and Liverpool University (UK) had the highest number of internationally collaborative papers, followed by Centre of Disease Control and Prevention (USA). http://dx.doi.org/ 10.14429/djlit.34.7342

This study examined the intensity of a collaborative communication process in a computer supported and distributed social collaborative design-build project. It focused on how different design-build professional’s concept knowledge can be saved, retrieved, and reused from their local computer system. It also centered on how these concepts can be shared in a virtual distributed social communication environment to enhancement the effect of the multi-professions collaboration. Extensive prior research has revealed that the communication process is the most important collaboration study problem. The design-build stakeholders jointly form a shared understanding through a process of defining the problem, exploring the space of solutions and searching for information. Much research has concluded that a shared understanding is a critical element in successful, collaborative design. This paper describes a distributed computation (agent-based) approach for identifying shared understanding in design-build communication process by analyzing communication data. By mining the relationship between collaborative participants of a shared understanding, specifically a common interest of document reference and a similar voice, a shared design-build concept knowledge and relationship of the design can emerge. Communication support tools built around shared understanding would be more effective in directing and alerting the design-build team to relevant information. The result of this paper was that not only the design data itself emphasized the value of communication but also the hidden relationships among data which generated shared understanding. We constructed the distributed social communication data model to support user to save, retrieve, and analyze among the communication process in a design-build project. We also implemented an exhaustive recommender data mining model as the clustering engine to exposing the hidden relationships among communication data. This communication data relationship also can be regarded as a user’s familiarity index with the design concept, which can be shared with others in the design-build collaborative team. Two real world design-build projects were used to test, validate, modify, and confirm the function of distributed social collaborative design-build system, implemented by this paper. In conclusion, the distributed collaborative system turned out to be highly collaborative in respect of design concept and was utilized intensely in organizing the design-build process.

The structure of scientific collaboration networks of the publications of the Indian Institute of Science for a span of 11 years from 1996-2006 is investigated using Bibexcel software as an analytical tool for the data derived from the Web of Science database. The study analyses the author productivity, discipline-wise and institution-wise collaboration and national and international collaboration. It is observed from the analysis that large numbers of research publications are collaborative in nature. There is a steady growth in the collaboration during the study period. The top five countries with which IISc is collaborating is: USA, Japan, France, Germany and UK. Major disciplines in which collaboration is observed are: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering and Materials Science. The top five institutions with which IISc is collaborating are: Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Science Research, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and University of Madras.