Relation-Based Groupware For Heterogeneous Design Teams
Résumé :
This paper describes a work about coordination of concurrent engineering in the building construction and design. More particularly it describes the coordination of project teams which are heterogeneous and short-lived. The French context of the building trade is at present characterized by an increase of the quality requirements and by a reduction of the conception and realization delays. This induces the building sector to look for new modes of cooperation as they already exist in industry and services. With a few exceptions, the concurrent engineering tools taken from these sectors are not used in building projects. We make the assumption that the lack of use of these tools is due to the non-fitting of the common existing tools to the specificities of our sector.
The solution we propose give a relational vision of the cooperation and the interactions existing during the processes of conception-construction in architectural works. Our first interest point concerns the representation of the actors, the documents and the assignments as a relational network and not as a hierarchical tree, mostly used in the groupware tools. In a second point, we use this relational network to produce a graphic and dynamic representation of the projects.
The goal of this method is to reinforce the co-operation and the group awareness by supplying to the actors a good vision of the project evolution in order to increase the conception quality.