Toward a framework for effective collaborative product development

Collaborative product design is an approach for supporting designers connected by network, to participate in distributed and dynamic product development environment. Communication, negotiation, coordination and cooperation became essential for effective preparation and to follow-up design changes and conflicts. A collaborative environment requires a mechanism allowing the project actors to recognize and to resolve the interdependence-conflict among their respective terms. We suggest the use of constraint based system to facilitate and support the conflict resolution through synchronization process. This paper presents: (1) a framework to improve asynchronous as well as synchronous collaboration (2) a constraint based model for detecting design conflicts (3) a new notification mechanism for presenting conflict to all corresponding actors. These results should contribute to the improvement of collaborative design.