A Collaborative Framework for Handling the Process Design Process

GONNET, S.; LEONE, H.; HENNING, G.

Village Rio das Pedras

Congreso; ENPROMER 2005. 4th Mercosur Congress on Process Systems Engineering; 2005

UFRJ - UFF - UERJ

Cooperative tools belonging to the field of CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) are currently available to face complex design activities tackled by teams of engineers. Most of them focus on communication (messaging) and coordination features (approval forms, workflow tools, video-conference tools). However, there is a lack of tools supporting the conflict management process (CMP), taking care of conflict detection and resolution tasks. To overcome such troubles, this contribution introduces a framework enabling the capture of the operations and actors that have originated each product. This capture is based on an explicit mechanism to manage different versions of the design products. On such basis, this proposal introduces specific procedures to handle various situations appearing in cooperative environments, such as: (i) Different design teams perform independent concurrent activities on “a priori” independent parts of the artefact being designed and afterwards their results need to be made consistent. (ii) Distinct teams concurrently work on slightly coupled parts of the artefact being designed and conflict handling must be addressed along their “parallel” course of actions. The proposed framework is based on a hybrid approach combining object-oriented technology, first order logic and situational calculus.