Integrated experience-based support of cooperative engineering design processes

The main concern of an (engineering) design process is the investigation and application of novel, state of the art methodologies on the design of an (engineered) product, in order to increase its anticipated quality in a profitable way. Undoubtedly, design process excellence is vital for a company to stay in business, since it predetermines to a large degree the competitiveness of its products. The employment of well-established approaches aiming at the computer-based improvement of processes seems promising for making strides towards the faster and cheaper development of better products. The support provided by most of the existing approaches is based on prescribed assumptions concerning the evolution of the process. Yet, design processes exhibit an inherent dynamic nature that is less clear in other domains (e.g., routine business processes). As a consequence, many available process support systems fail to provide them with adequate support. The goal of this thesis is to present an approach for the fine-grained support of design processes, taking their inherent dynamic nature into consideration. The developed concepts build on the idea of the process integration of tools that which was contributed by preceding researchers, and extends it towards three directions. First, the original models for process integration are integrated with selected cooperative extensions in order to achieve a better synergy with the administrative level and provide support across several technical workplaces. The second direction has to do with the extension of the idea of process integration itself. More specifically, the existing mechanism is reworked in order to facilitate the flexible integration of a broader variety of tools according to their assessed capabilities. Last, a reuse mechanism is introduced for the direct and situated reuse of product, media and process traces captured in previous design processes. The overall approach has been validated through implementation in the frame of an interdisciplinary project dealing with the support of the early design phases in chemical engineering