Human intent description as a tool for communication between engineers

The authors describe their investigations on exchanging design intent information between engineers using extended models of engineering objects. The research work is motivated by widespread application of advanced concurrent engineering systems where a lot of human-computer and human-human communication related problems emerge. These problems cannot be solved using regular product modeling methods. The problem complex has been divided into four sub-problems. They are communication of the intent source human with the computer system, representation of the intent, exchange of intent data between modeling procedures and communication of the represented intent with a human. The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, the problems, main objectives and earlier results are outlined with the related communications and model representations in the center. Following this the human-procedure-human communication chain is characterized and new related communication and modeling methods are proposed by the authors. Then representative experiments and the applied laboratory environment are outlined. Finally the proposed methods and experimental results are concluded