The Language of Collaborative Manufacturing

Today's machines and products are so advanced in terms of their materials, form, construction, control and drive systems that they require expertise and resource that extends beyond the reach of even the world's largest organisations. As a consequence, the design, development and manufacture of, for example, a modern aircraft is undertaken by a large globally distributed network of organisations. While defining this network poses a design problem by itself, it is the challenge of managing such large, highly distributed, high value projects that is of upmost concern to industry presently. This is not only because of the recent spate of high profile cost overruns, delivery setbacks and collapsed projects, but also because of aspects of leakage of intellectual property, exposure to risk, and difficulties capturing design records, lessons learned, decisions and rationale.

Engineering projects of the sort previously described are critically dependent upon two key toolsets. These are electronic communication tools (e.g. email) and digital objects (reports, CAD models and simulations). These communication tools and digital objects are fundamentally related. Engineers around the globe communicate electronically in order to create and evolve digital objects which are the basis for the design, manufacture, assembly, delivery and maintenance of products and machines. It is this relationship and co-evolution of communication and digital objects that lies at the heart of every engineering project, embodying not only the engineering work itself but also control of intellectual property, decision making, rationale and problem solving. For these reasons, it is proposed that, through an understanding of the relationship and co-evolution of communication and digital objects, it is possible to improve the management, control and performance of engineering projects.

The vision of this research will be realised through a suite of ICT tools that embody new methods and approaches for capturing and analysing the content and evolution of engineering communication and digital objects, and new methods and approaches for generating, representing, interacting with, and interpreting what are defined as signatures of in communications and digital objects. The term signature is used to represent a meaningful relationship between one or more dimensions of communication and/or digital objects at a point in time or over a period of time.

The research programme firstly considers the two dimensions of communication and digital objects. The aim here is to characterise what are referred to as the "language of collaborative manufacturing" (content of communication) and "patterns of evolution of digital objects" (construction and changes to digital objects) and to explore means of classifying content and structure, and means of generating signatures.

The programme then explores the relationship between the co-evolution of these two dimensions. Here the aim is to establish sets of signatures, relationships between signatures and patterns of signatures that embody meaning for improving aspects of collaborative engineering such as those previously stated. This phase then investigates means of representing and visualising the signatures/patterns.

The third phase of the programme researches new methods and approaches for project stakeholders to interact and meaningfully interpret signature sets, relationships and patterns with the aim of providing continuous real-time feedback. Such capability will enable advance warning of issues, improved management, increased productivity and ultimately improved design and manufacture of the product.

In addition to the three major phases, the programme has a research strand focussed on testing and validation of the new methods and approaches, and characterising best practice, as well as new ways of setting up and managing collaborative work which will be used as part of outreach and knowledge transfer activities.

The scope of impact of this research programme is broad, with the potential to positively impact all industries, institutions and organisations involved in collaborative work. However, the primary focus for impact is UK engineering which includes manufacturing, construction, engineering service providers and the creative industries.

The manufacturing, construction and creative sectors are, collectively, a major part of the UK economy. In recent years the UK manufacturing output has totalled over £150bn and is ranked sixth in the world, while the UK construction industry is estimated to be worth over £300bn. Similarly, the creative industries (design, publishing and media) employ almost 6% of the UK population and generated over £122bn for the UK economy in 2006. This position is being maintained in the face of immense competition from developing nations. Central to achieving this is the ability to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative work across the breadth of the supply chains both nationally and globally. This effectiveness and efficiency not only concerns cost and quality, and the avoidance of much publicised cost overruns, but increasingly aspects of management and control of intellectual property (IP), exposure to risk, negotiations, costing, decision-making, rationale and cohesion across multi-disciplinary teams to maximise quality/innovation.

In terms of cost overruns, it has been estimated by the US National Science Foundation that the total value of delay and cost overruns stands at $150 million each day for the US Department of Defense alone. While such figures are unavailable for the UK, it is likely that a similar relative magnitude of cost is incurred by UK industry. Hence, if the new methods and approaches created in this programme can reduce this by even a few per cent this would equate to £multi-million savings per week for UK industry.
In the case of IP, retention and management is critically important for UK companies and will increase in importance with the introduction of Patent Box which requires that IP be retained and registered in the UK in order for organisations to receive tax savings. The new methods and approaches for monitoring and controlling aspects of collaborative work such as IP will thus have an important role in safeguarding UK IP in large collaborative projects.

In addition to benefiting engineering organisations, the new methods and approaches will benefit engineers, designers and other individuals involved in collaborative work through improved cohesion and collaborative activities thereby enhancing productivity and reducing tension. Society and the general public should also benefit from improved means for managing and controlling collaborative work through right-first-time products delivered to time and cost, which is increasingly important in the current economic downturn.

The new methods, approaches and ways of managing and controlling collaboration will also positively impact across all forms of knowledge-intensive collaboration including government departments and institutions such as the MOD. The new algorithms and approaches for analysis and representation of what are referred to as signatures in communication and digital objects will provide new areas of research including applied research across all forms of collaborative knowledge-based work. This includes, for example, legal, medical and the financial sectors.

Finally, all of the methods, approaches and models of collaboration that are created will offer opportunities for start-ups and exploitation by industrial users and software developers - particularly those in the engineering space and the technology partners involved in this research programme. These activities will be facilitated as part of the Impact plan.