Metadata Categories for Supporting Concurrent Engineering

Concurrent engineering is a keyword in today´s enterprises. Almost every enterprise parallelizes its engineering processes to reach a higher efficiency in designing their products. Unfortunately, the time- and cost-saving potential of concurrent engineering cannot be used to its full capacity. In fact, design problems arise and lead to a lot of rework. As we have recognized, design problems always affect the underlying data. Thus, wrong data is an indication of such problems. As a consequence, the improvement of the data quality should reduce the design problems. Although the data quality-related research community has proposed various management approaches, these approaches are too generic and thus give little guidance about what to do in a given situation. The goal of our project, DQ-Step, is to develop a solution that is both general enough to cover an entire domain, namely concurrent engineering, while remaining concrete enough to give usable guidelines to enterprises to support their engineers and finally speed up their design. In our previous work, we have already identified the major problems in concurrent engineering. In this paper, we discuss the metadata categories required to help overcome these problems.