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 Link Adobe Reader