ACATAD - Advanced communications applied to aerospace development

The development of aerospace products, similarly to other complex industrial cases, involves the deep cooperation of several kinds of entities, including: pure research made at Universities and Research Centres, specialised testing in complex facilities mainly available at Aerospace Research Institutes and engineering activities led by the industrial partners with the cooperation of small specialised companies. Industrial Aerospace Companies normally co-operate with Universities, Aerospace Research Institutes and Small Engineering Companies, performing different kind of tasks with each of them and interchanging different kind of data and information on each case. The Advanced Communications Applied To Aerospace Development ( ACATAD) is a Best Practice action, under the ESPRIT - HPGN Programme, which pretend to prove and transfer the use of Computer Supported Go-operative Working (CSCW) tools, namely: ftp/ e-mail, videoconferencing, real time shared applications and collaborative writing and drawing, into three real aerospace industrial scenarios. COVISE, the Collaborative Visualisation and Simulation Environment software developed at RUS acts as the integration platform to share applications and collaboratively discuss simulation and test results. The impact of the CSCW techniques, will be tested in three different experiments: Tele-testing Co-operative Structural Analysis Co-operative Thermal Control.