Communicative engineering

The paper highlights the importance of communication and collaboration in engineering and discusses driving factors concerning this matter. Afterwards the author presents a general model for collaboration, including the technical, the strategic, the organizational, and the staff-realted viewpoint. The technical viewpoint is presented in more detail n the main part of the article by giving examples for explicit and implicit collaboration. Here the solution for PDM-based collaboration using a federation of heterogenous PDM systems plays a major role. After presenting experiences from communicative engineering in the automotive as well as in the shipbuilding industry, the paper concludes with a summary and some outlook to further work