Problem solving facilities in human-centred collaborative environment

SMEs suffer at times through lack of expertise and knowledge and do not always make full use of their people by converting tacit knowledge to explicit product design work. They may need to collaborate with multiple experts from different disciplines through an on-line virtual collaborative workspace to implement a complicated product design. This paper presents a Web-based collaborative working environment to help SME customers to leverage all the interests from different experts in order to obtain design optimisation. The system provides problem-solving facilities including distributed multiple objective design optimization tool and support users to dynamically define design objectives, design complaints and design variables.