A generic library of knowledge components to manage conflicts in CE tasks

Concurrent Engineering requires a cooperative work-group of teams in which several multidisciplinary teams of engineers, designers, process planners c ollaborate to build a system. Conflicts appear during this collaboration du e to differences in the background and experiences of the team members (pro duct engineers, designers, process planners, etc.) in the work-groups. To l everage the product development teams' (PDTs-engineers, designers, managers , and knowledge workers) know-how during product development, a historical trace of their experiences in a particular domain of interest can be captur ed into a series of digital or virtual models. In this paper the authors pr esent some guidelines to build such library of knowledge components particu larly for conflict management. How this generic library of knowledge compon ents would model work-group tasks in CE is explained. Also the authors desc ribe how to develop methods to manage conflicts in CE tasks, and a methodol ogy to use this library.