Facilitating Distributed Collaborative Product Development In An Undergraduate Curriculum

In the quest to be more competitive, many corporations have embraced Lean Management, Just-InTime and Total Quality Management coupled with cutting edge Information Technology. Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools enable engineers to efficiently and quickly realize and simulate concepts virtually, reducing the need for expensive prototyping and testing. Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) enables manufacturers to directly utilize information generated by designers to manufacture parts. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) ties all of these innovations together tracking mountains of data, enabling distributed multidisciplinary teams to share information in real-time over the Internet. In 2002 Georgia Tech and PTC of Needham, MA founded the PLM Center of Excellence at Georgia Tech to explore the concepts of fostering and teaching multidisciplinary Distributed Collaborative Product Development (DCPD) in an academic curriculum. With several pilot programs securely under our belts, we embarked upon a “Grand Experiment” involving students from multiple schools and many disciplines collaborating virtually to design and deliver a product over a twoyear period. This paper documents one of the pilot DCPD projects conducted by students and faculty at Georgia Tech and the University of Maryland College Park during the spring semester of 2003 to identify and explore potential issues relating to the “Grand Experiment". We introduce our 2-year capstone DCPD project which began in the fall semester of 2003 with Mechanical Engineering students from Georgia Tech, University of Maryland and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign collaborating to design an amphibious utility vehicle for the John Deere Corporation. We also outline our plans for involving students from Industrial Design, Manufacturing, Business and other disciplines in the spring semester of 2004 to complete the product development lifecycle complete. We firmly believe that the future of engineering education must involve integrating IT into the classroom to foster multidisciplinary distributed collaborative product development in the undergraduate curriculum and we welcome this opportunity to share our experiences with our colleagues.