As engineering products become more complicated, collaboration among multi-disciplinary design teams that are separated by location, time and across organizations is becoming an increasingly difficult task. To be effective, collaboration requires exchanging, interpreting and integrating knowledge in various locations. According to a recent study, the cost of this breakdown in knowledge in the automotive industry alone is at least $1 billion per year. There has been a significant amount of research in recent years to improve the accessibility of knowledge during design. Very little has, however, been invested in format, flow and relationships of knowledge to support the process of collaborative distributed design. Progress is particularly lagging for early stages of engineering design, conceptual design, when the need for and payoff of knowledge exchange is the greatest. This paper presents the Integrated Design Environment that is being developed at the Systems Modeling And Realization Technologies (SMART) Lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This environment facilitates knowledge flow, knowledge capture and reuse with a generalized graphical modeling environment for conceptual modeling and synthesis. The paper first provides a background in conceptual design and knowledge-based engineering followed by an architectural view of the environment and finally an example problem based on the design of a coffee maker to facilitate discussion.
