Supporting product lifecycle collaboration and knowledge-related evaluation: an active-passive collaboration mechanism and fuzzy evaluation method

Abstract

Collaboration is essential to improve the efficiency of product research and development (R&D), shorten the R&D cycle, and reduce the R&D costs in complex product lifecycle model management (CPLMM). However, disorganized processes and the unreliability of the result evaluation remain enormous challenges for efficient collaboration. This article proposes an active-passive collaboration mechanism to enable a regulated collaboration system, which can direct the self-organized collaboration of stakeholders. C-D-Petri Net is presented for the formal collaboration process modeling. The result evaluation in active-passive collaboration involves multi-source knowledge across disciplines and phases. To address the unreliable collaboration evaluation (Co-evaluation) caused by insufficient evaluation knowledge and weak correlation between expertise and evaluation task, the collaborative fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (CFCE) model is established to support Co-evaluation actions, and its core improvement lies in the definition and introduction of collaboration volume. Finally, a simulated aircraft horizontal tail control system is regarded as an engineering application case to demonstrate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.