An experiment in supporting geographically distributed engineering design

Abstract: "Many of the research projects currently underway and being considered for the future at the Engineering Design Research Center involve geographically distributed project teams. The extent of interaction within this distributed team may vary from that of distant vendors who are not members of the project team but whose performance and synchronization with the project are vital -- to members of the design team actively collaborating on a project to the extent of discussing detailed design, systems interface issues, and joint authoring of documentation. This report presents issues encountered in creating and operating an infrastructure to support such a distributed design team. Our approach is to identify requirements for supporting collaboration in an engineering design project from the perspective of types of information used and interactions between participants involved in the process, examining the set of available tools from this framework, as well as the changes in the design process necessitated due to constraints imposed by geographical remoteness of team members and limitations of existing technology. Recommendations are made for future engineering design projects considering the use of computer supported collaboration tools."