The engineering information has a central role in product development: it describes and documents the constitution and behavior of the product; it drives the product development process and is the object of verification and validation procedures. With the current emphasis being on companies to supply products and provide support services throughout the product lifetime, the realisation is that the engineering information being lost can aid in both the product life cycle support and also the development of new products. The stakeholders with different roles in product development process would like to leverage all relevant information no matter where it originated, no matter what its format, and no matter where it resides in order to help their organization innovate, compete, provide service and grow. In order to understand and reuse existing engineering information along meaning, reasons, arguments, documentations, choices, critique, consequences etc. engineers need to be able to trace engineering information evolution. To support these activities, new and advanced engineering information traceability methods, models and tools are required, which allow the engineering information evolution to be traced into the future. The project objective is to establish a framework for traceability of engineering information evolution within the new and evolving paradigm of the long and total product-service life cycle. To achieve this objective, two particular key aims have been set: to develop tools, methods, and associated theoretical foundations for understanding and supporting the traceability of engineering information evolution; to investigate the dynamics of the engineering information evolution throughout the product life cycle in order to provide environment in which the traceability tools and methods can be made operational and effective in industrial context. The project will build on state of the art developments in the exploration of principles for engineering information management. It will go further, in that it will seek to incorporate development of the engineering information objects, sources, stakeholders, decisions and rationale, as well as time dimension into engineering information evolution space and extend in such way the state of the art methods and tools. The proposal argue that by building approach to engineering information evolution traceability that will integrate all the dimensions, will result that traceability framework referring to context and audit trails of engineering information evolution to be identified. It is expected that all the results will be compressed by building the prototype tools in order to explain the contributions.
E!4911
2009 - 2011
EUREKA Programme EU
