A generic library of knowledge components to manage conflicts in CE tasks

Concurrent Engineering requires a cooperative work-group of teams in which several multidisciplinary teams of engineers, designers, process planners collaborate to build a system. Conflicts appear during this collaboration due to differences in the background and experiences of the team members (product engineers, designers, process planners, etc.) in the work-groups. To leverage the product development teams' (PDTs-engineers, designers, managers, and knowledge workers) know-how during product development, a historical trace of their experiences in a particular domain of interest can be captured into a series of digital or virtual models. In this paper the authors present some guidelines to build such library of knowledge components particularly for conflict management. How this generic library of knowledge components would model work-group tasks in CE is explained. Also the authors describe how to develop methods to manage conflicts in CE tasks, and a methodology to use this library.