The objective of this research project is to develop a technological and organisational framework for the management and communication of conceptual design knowledge in a distributed environment. This framework allows designers to model their expertise and use it in computational design reasoning; it also allows them to share this expertise, enabling them to use each other’s design knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The project has developed the technology and the organisational aspects that are required for designers to build up a common, but distributed, design knowledge base. Technologically, the result is a framework that implements a distributed object model with object-level versioning.
This project was, in the first year, executed at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal) and co-financed by Eindhoven University of Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Education.