An engineering framework needed to redress critical information sharing, communication and coordination issues that are all but ignored by today's CAD systems. The proposed project will combine sophisticated DARPA-sponsored technology, such a shared knowledge representations and intelligent agents, with emerging mainstream information technologles llke hypermedia, expert systems, and electronic mail, to create a unique computer-supported cooperative mechanical design environment that is both practical and truly useful to engineers. Each participant will have hlsmer own particular product perspective and automated analysis tools, but everyone on the project would be tied togetherthrough shared on-line handbooks, catalogs, and notebooks. These resources would be accessed in a uniform fashion via a highly intuitive user interface running on everyone's workstation or pc. Phase I of this project will develop a plan for integrating the key technologles and evaluating the potential productivity gain from applying them in industrial settings. Through interactions with working engineers atLockheeds we will focus on system features that provide the highest productivity gains for the least programming effort, and then build a small prototype of the proposed environment, leveraging on tools already available in our DARPA-sponsored research temse we will evaluate the prototype in collaboration with lockheed and other aerospace companies. Antichpated benefits/potential commercial applications- EI Tech's charter is to productize the results of its collaborative research with stanford university in concurrent engineering and intelligent CIM. This project would significantly shorten the tlme to transfer our research on supporting distributed design teams into industrial tools.
