Teamwork collaboration around simulation data in an industrial context

Abstract

Nowadays even more small, medium and large enterprises are world-wide and compete on a global market. In order to face the new challenges, industries have multiple co-located and geographically dispersed teams that work across time, space, and organisational boundaries. A virtual team or a dispersed team is a group of geographically, organisationally and/or time dispersed knowledge workers who coordinate their work using electronic technologies to accomplish a common goal. The advent of Internet and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) technologies can reduce the distances between these teams and are used to support the collaboration among them. The topic of this thesis concerns the engineering dispersed teams and their collaboration within enterprises. In this context, the contributions of this thesis are the following: I was able to (1) identify the key collaborative requirements analysing a real use case of two engineering dispersed teams within Fiat Chrysler Automobiles; (2) address each of them with an integrated, extensible and modular architecture; (3) implement a working industrial prototype called Floasys to collect, centralise, search, and share simulations as well as automate repetitive, error-prone and time-consuming tasks like the document generation; (4) design a tool called ExploraTool to visually explore a repository of simulations provided by Floasys, and (5) identify the possible extensions of this work to other contexts (like aeronautic, rail and naval sectors). The first research aim of this work is the analysis of the key collaborative requirements within a real industrial use case of geographically dispersed teams. In order to gather these requirements, I worked closely with two geographically separated engineering teams in Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA): one team located in Pomigliano D'Arco (Italy) and the other one in Torino (Italy). Both teams use computer numerical Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations to design vehicle products simulating physical phenomenons, such as vehicle aerodynamic and its drag coefficient, or the internal ow for the passengers thermal comfort. The applied methodology to collect the collaborative and engineering requirements is based on an extensive literature review, on site directly observations, stakeholders' interviews and an user survey. The identi ed key collaborative requirements as actions to perform to improve the collaboration among dispersed teams are: centralise simulation data, provide metadata over simulation data, provide search facility, simulation data versioning, and data sharing. .. [edited by Author]