COFFEE – Collaborative Forgetting for Engineering Design

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Steffen Staab; Professor Dr.-Ing. Sandro Wartzack
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318363223

In engineering, product development is a collaborative activity reusing and adapting existing product models. While capturing design rationale is effective to deal with adaptations by teams, adaptation not only requires joint extension of models, as supported by existing methods for design rationale, but also removing what is no longer relevant or in conflict. Such Intentional Forgetting (IF) is difficult, as may affect assemblages of elements, should not over- or underdelete, and may require undoing. While EVOWIPE (our phase 1 project) has successfully tackled IF, project teams require methods for Collaborative Forgetting:C1 Design Rationale and IF: Neither engineering nor computer science foresee methods to capture reasons for something that has been dismissed. Thus, team members might inadvertently reintroduce what was discarded before. How do we capture and represent design rationales behind forgetting?C2 Varying Levels of Granularity and IF: Collaborative engineering must find compromises between different requirements. How can we establish compromise by partial forgetting?C3 Cooperative Work and IF: Cooperative environments handle conflicts during model extension. Interwoven intricate forgetting is not supported in known cooperative environments. How can we concurrently add and remove designs and avoid inconsistencies?COFFEE constitutes basic research about novel collaborative forgetting supporting engineers in developing product models in teams with sophisticated reuse and adaptation. COFFEE will extend successful ontologybased knowledge representations of EVOWIPE; it will tackle challenges C1–C3 pursuing closely aligned objectives (O1–O3) and work packages (WP1–WP3) and comprehensive evaluations (WP4).KTmfk and WeST have shown in EVOWIPE (ongoing throughout 2019) that individually and jointly they can contribute highly original research. Their joint paper (Kügler, Kestel, et al., 2018) won an outstanding contribution award of DESIGN-2018.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1921: Intentional Forgetting