Towards a framework to manage formalised exchanges during collaborative design Original Research Article

New organizational frameworks for companies dealing with product development are required for the new market rules as for the rising pressure and complexity in product and process development. Thus, the new stake is to examine new methods of leading design activities as the cooperative design that deals with the sharing of various interests and resources among various actors, with the aim of reaching a common purpose. The latter lay on the development of products by means of knowledge sharing and interactions with a certain level of coordination between these varied activities. Embedded into the IPPOP research project perspectives, this paper focus on the particular collaborative situation of conflict management occurring during design activities. From an analysis of the conflict management domain, we shall specify a collaborative design framework dedicated to conflict handling thanks to one specification method based on the UML language. The specified solving process is applied on a real-life industrial case: a windmill stator sheet design. The design context of the artefact is exposed and the met conflicts are explained. Extracts of IPPOP demonstratorʹs graphical user interfaces, illustrating these collaborative aspects of the software application are then presented. They show the ability of the demonstrator to run the conflict solving process and to subscribe relevant actors in this process as well as filers to track pertinent past solutions suitable for the current problem.