Distributed knowledge creation, recording and improvement in collaborative design

The design of complex industrial products requires more knowledge than the one that a single person can possess. A successful industrial design entails a collaborative activity between designers and engineers during which they share their specialized knowledge accepting and interpreting their points of view through a multi-disciplinary and collaborative methodology. In particular, this paper focuses on issues related to the knowledge creation, management and enrichment for industrial collaborative design in virtual environment. The idea is to endow the virtual environment, used to create the 3D models and to carry out the analysis, with a knowledge management (KM) module able to gather information about different versions of the product and simulation analysis data. Moreover, this KM module includes an annotation tool used to support annotation-based collaboration between designers and engineers through which they can exchange impressions, ideas, and comments in order to achieve a shared solution about an industrial design issue.