A novel knowledge-based approach to support virtual teamwork in collaborative design

Collaborative design can provide creative design solutions and improve product quality as well as enrich the participants’ knowledge. Nevertheless, design and supply chains integration in traditional product development processes is not a trivial task. Main difficulties are related to the different levels of individual expertise of team members and to the different organization of involved companies. The complex scenario of the extended enterprise triggers research toward the development of new methods and tools for managing virtual teamwork. The present research illustrates an innovative co-design platform that implements a novel approach to support multidisciplinary workgroups. Starting from the definition of a new design process model integrating different collaborative dimensions, the proposed approach is based on the formalization of the distributed knowledge in terms of interaction rules and representational models.