SHADE: Technology for Knowledge-based Collaborative Engineering

Languages for Communication and Cooperation in Collaborativ Design

Information shying and decision coordination arc central problems for collaborative product development and enterprise-wide coordination. Designers, manufacturing engineers, and marketing engineers need to assess the impact of their decisions and notify affected parties as the product evolves. Yet, existing CAD tools tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, or make overly-strong commitments to an all-encompassing common model. Furthermore, there is often no automated support outside of the design function. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project is working on knowledge-based methods to improve the communication in the product development process. There arc three mare components of SHADE: a shared knowledge representation (language and domain-specific vocabulary); protocols for information exchange enabling change notification and subscription; and facilitation services such, as content-directed routing, and intelligent matching of information consumers and producers. SHADE is being applied to several real domains, including the Palo Alto Collaborative Testbed.