Complex process integration and coordination
The design of made to order products involves large multi-disciplinary teams, frequently operating from geographically dispersed locations and spanning organisational boundaries. As in many sectors, there is an ever increasing pressure to compress engineering timescales, whilst continuing to reduce costs and improve quality. Essential enabling technologies in support of such improvements address two key areas:
- Management and communication of design information between the agents involved in the engineering process.
- Coordination of the activity of these agents.
Agents involved in the process include people, analysis software and databases. Rapid and effective communication of consistent information is critical in ensuring that designers and others involved in the process are able to asses fully the impact of changes to the product definition.
In order to fully exploit developments in this area, improvements in coordination are also required, ensuring that the resources available are used to best effect.
EDC research in this area includes information exchange, communication between distributed agents and process coordination. The core research programme is complemented by a major implementation with an industrial partner.
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Commercial Research at Newcastle University
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Upcoming seminars
The EDC often hosts, arranges or is associated with a wide variety of seminars related to its activities.
These seminars (often in association with an engineering institute) are always open to students and staff at the university and often to the public.
Upcoming events will be listed on this website in the future. Please check back from time to time for updates.
