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ADCT Coordinates Design Teams and Captures Rationale and Expertise
| Customer |
NASA |
| Users |
Distributed, Cross-Discipline, Engineering
Design Teams |
| Need |
Coordinating the design of today's large-scale
aerospace systems is an enormously difficult yet critical task.
Design teams can include thousands of engineers, including engineers
from hundreds of subcontracting companies. Yet, most design
errors, design rework, and wasted design time is caused by communication
and coordination errors among designers and other decision makers,
especially when these people are in different locations or organizations.
To reduce design time, costs, and design errors while improving
the quality of the designs, aerospace design teams require software
tools that streamline the coordination of parallel design activities
and the communication of design decisions. |
| Solution |
The Advanced Design Coordination Tool (ADCT)
is an active, web-based repository of design decisions and underlying
rationale. ADCT helps large, distributed design teams work more
effectively by tracking possible effects of design changes and
sending notifications to affected designers automatically. ADCT
also serves as a knowledge management system that preserves
an organization’s design expertise by providing easy access
to previously-solved engineering design problems and the rationale
for past design decisions.
ADCT supports the needs of today’s large-scale, distributed,
concurrent engineering efforts by reducing coordination lapses
that often result in project delays or even failure. ADCT is
ideal for organizations that require extensive formal documentation
and decision traceability. It offers a knowledge management
edge for businesses with long-lived products or evolving product
families. |
| Status |
Stottler Henke completed development of an operational version of ADCT
in fall of 2001. ADCT rationale representation technology is also being
used to support other Stottler Henke knowledge management systems under
development. |
Related
Applications |
ADCT can be used by engineering teams in
diverse disciplines. Stottler Henke is exploring the applicability
of ADCT technologies to facilitate collaborative and improve
coordination among large teams of investigators, researchers,
and business decision-makers. |
Additional
information |
ADCT Data Sheet 
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