Integrated versioning and collaboration process management of automotive production lines based on an artifact-centric collaboration environment

Abstract: While collaborative engineering in outsourcing projects presents potential benefits to the partners, it involves some risks and reasonable concerns. First, a poor mechanism of data exchange and data communication can lead to loss of effectiveness and efficiency of the project. Second, collaborative engineering requires partners to adapt a common business process, which often means moving away from a familiar way of working. Thus, it is crucial to find an optimal way a collaboration can be achieved with the lowest waste due to changes in communication practices, and losses in efficiency due to asynchronous processes or big amount of exchange data. The main goal of this thesis is to connect two aspects in a collaboration: data-exchange and process-based execution. The main reason to do so is to resolve a problem with a weak control over information needed for successful project execution. Three research methods are used in this work: a case study to analyze how collaboration is performed in the industry and which problems exist; a literature review to understand how existing collaboration tools can be adapted to help solving the identified problems; and a prototypical implementation to show how automated versioning of engineering knowledge can be added to the union of data exchange and process-based aspects. The case study was performed and a list of business requirements was presented. Based on the list of requirements, solutions within the literature were searched. A process-based artifact-centric concept was applied to the case study scenario. Objectives are achieved, however, the problem was shown on an example of one company, which presents a limitation, as generalization has not been proved.