COLLABORATIVE PLATFORM TO SUPPORT THE DEVELOPMENT OF DESIGN PROJECTS FOLLOWING THE CONCURRENT ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES

The collaborative platform to support the development of design projects following the concurrent engineering principles is a web portal designed and developed in order to integrate team works around a design methodology which propose four challenges in order to: define the methodology approach, use mathematical models to optimize the design, apply solution algorithms and build the design object. To achieve the above challenges, we use tools such as forums, chat, hyperlinks and documents library to interconnect people. In addition to this we specify six team works that has specific tasks. In this way, we have the design project team that allows portal members to know about design project process; the analysis team of customer’s needs, that has a QFD matrix which evaluate the quality function deployment; the conceptual design team which uses a decision tool to select the best solution between some options proposed; the engineering team that discuses about the process to be followed in the project development according to the results of the design team; validation and tuning team which manage the final design products to refine their characteristics and deliver it to marketing team: the marketing team should establish a price of the product and put these on the market.

Additionally, the collaborative platform is integrated to the academia in a university in Colombia under a research project about the optimal design of semitrailers for heavy vehicles in which the main problems that people have when they want to develop tools, mainly because they do not clearly know how to design the tools mentioned above. To achieve an optimal design we propose the collaborative platform as a way to support the solution of those problems integrating a multidisciplinary team of industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, graphical designers, industrial designers, marketing professionals among others.

According to the previous items, we develop the web portal as a collaborative platform under a research methodology based on different research models and a Knowledge management methodology to establish communities of practice. The collaborative platform and their additional development components were integrated by means of the open-source Liferay portal.