Multiple views system to support awareness for cooperative design

It is acknowledged that multiple views technology improves designer's work efficiency by filtering redundant information. However, the increased need of cooperative activities in product design process requires views incorporating Cooperative awareness information (CAI), content of which should be lean for understanding and sortable according to importance. To achieve this target, this paper proposes an Object-based cooperative awareness model (OBCWM) and corresponding multiple views system. Requirements of CAI in product design are firstly analyzed. Then OBCWM is proposed, which consists of a CPM (Core product model) based concept framework. By use of CPM, an algorithm to calculate awareness intensity is developed based on object-oriented method. To support the mechanism of OBCWM, a multiple views system is then designed with "flexible view", content of which is adjustable according to awareness intensity between CAI objects. After introduction to the system, application on a case is presented, followed by the evaluation of this system. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.