Supporting Collaborative Engineering with Information Supply Patterns

Starting from industrial requirements towards collaborative engineering environments, the paper introduces the concept of ¿information supply pattern¿ for capturing organisational knowledge for improved information flow. Information supply patterns capture organizational knowledge about the typical information demand of an organizational role in a textual description and a visual model, which can serve as basis for analyzing information flow problems and developing organizational and technical improvements. The contribution of this paper are (1) the concept of an information supply pattern, (2) structure for textual description and visual model of such patterns, and (3)an example for the use of information supply patterns when creating solutions to an information flow problem.