Challenges in collaborative design in engineering networks

Distributed collaborative design is a new emerging engineering paradigm. Collaboration in dispersed engineering teams is indispensable if time-to-market requirements are to be fulfilled in designing complex and heterogeneous systems. Engineering networks bring collaboration to a level of networked organizations. The paper presents challenges that need to be addressed in order to enable collaborative design in engineering networks. Requirements for a CAD-oriented network-based collaborative working environment are formulated as a result of lessons learned in the EU project MAPPER. The MAPPER collaboration platform and its use in a distributed electronic component design have been introduced in order to illustrate presented concepts.