Development of control mechanisms to support coherency of product model during cooperative design process

Product development became an increasingly collaborative and distributed activity. Collaborative design process gathers experts from different backgrounds and areas for a common objective about product development. An effective exchange support is expected to share and integrate design knowledge avoiding conflicts between designers. The management of heterogeneous product representation is a major step to integrate expert activities. To successfully manage this process, this paper proposes: (1) A research experimental platform for cooperative design in product development processes. (2) A new constraint based model to maintain complex relationships in multi-disciplinary cooperative design. (3) A model differentiation technique, which identifies differences and conflicts between models. (4) A Meta-rule concept, which controls the constraint network in design process, leading to a new notification mechanism to present conflict to all corresponding actors.