Patterns of engineering design collaboration and reasoning activities modelled with Coloured Petri Nets

Abstract

The increasing complexity of engineering activities emphasises the need to enhance software support for design team collaboration and improve the management of design process dynamics, especially in critical situations. Thus, this paper proposes a new approach in which a set of Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) enable a practical implementation of design activities ontology by modelling rules and relationships simultaneously with the instantiation of taxonomy elements. The development of the proposed model is based on an in-depth analysis of several long-lasting development projects in a large industrial company and three case studies on designers’ collaboration. To facilitate the implementation of ontology models into industrial practice, this work focuses on the issues of interoperability between design support systems and ontology models. The proposed method has significant potential to provide real-time updating and propagation of design information in teamwork.

KEYWORDS:

• Design activities ontology
• Coloured Petri Nets
• computer supported cooperative working
• design parameters
• project review meeting

Acknowledgements

This research is partially funded by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia and the Croatian Science Foundation MInMED project (www.minmed.org). The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jasmin Juranić http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6392-3783

Neven Pavković http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1291-0429

Additional information

Funding

This research is partially funded by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia and the Croatian Science Foundation MInMED project (www.minmed.org).