Performance evaluation of collaboration in the design process: Using interoperability measurement

• Proposing a meta-model of collaborative processes.
• Proposing a tooled methodology for collaborations’ performance evaluation based on the concept of interoperability.
• Evaluation of technical and conceptual interoperability in pair-wise collaborations.
• Application of OCL constraints in the technical interoperability evaluation.
• Application of a new tool, EMF Compare, in the conceptual interoperability evaluation.

A design process, whether for a product or for a service, is composed of a large number of activities connected by data and information exchanges. The quality of these exchanges, called in this paper collaboration, requires the ability to exchange useful, understandable and unambiguous data and information to the different designers involved. In this paper, a global framework is first set for process/product performance management. Then, the research question focuses on the definition and evaluation of the performance of collaborations, and by extension, of the design process in its entirety. This performance evaluation requires the definition of several key elements such as object to evaluate, the performance criteria, indicators and action variables. In order to define the object of evaluation, this paper relies on a literature study on collaboration resulting in an ECORE meta-model of collaborative processes. The collaboration performance measurement is for its part based on the concept of interoperability. This measure estimates the technical and conceptual interoperability of the different pairwise collaborations. The paper is concluded by proposing a tooled methodology for collaborations’ performance evaluation including two main phases: process modeling and interoperability measurement. Tooling is provided through the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) using its (meta-) model edition, constraint validation and model comparison features. The applicability of the methodology is also illustrated using a case study in design.