Distributed Collaborative Works

These actors, often geographically scattered, may have different industrial experiences and cultures. This situation raises new research issues on product design or management systems, issues arising from the complexity of the system depending on the number, distance and disparity of actors

First of all this multiplicity of actors and sites leads to fundamentally rethink the business of product design by integrating a collaborative and distributed dimension. This dimension is to consider not only in inter-business but also in international business to account for all those involved in the "design chain", supporting the process of creating the product offering and / or service. The performance is played much in the quality of the interfaces that the actors have been able to implement within this string. Thus, new modes of communication, exchange and sharing of information, coordination and cooperation between actors are to imagine and raise a number of questions. In the various trades involved and geographically distributed, what devices are set up to facilitate the co-construction of solutions as soon as possible by integrating production constraints and sustainable development, knowing that the product has not yet been designed? There is  uncertainty and ambiguity at the heart of trade and decision making.

At the inter-company, how can a project team lead its decision-making process regarding the inclusion or not of supplier design? How to select the supplier taking into account both the political and procurement needs of the project? How to ensure the success of the collaboration with the chosen supplier and the project team?

Once the product is designed, the various companies contributing to the marketing form what is called the "Supply Chain" (note that as with production constraints, it would be important to integrate the conception logistical constraints). Like in the "design chain", the performance is much played in the quality of coordination between actors in a chain. New modes of coordination and information sharing are also defined. But of course, that leads to the question of the overall profit of the chain compared to the profits of each player and to develop incentives that each actor can contribute to overall profit, without weakening his position. Moreover, the development of logistics makes the work on transport (supply and distribution) even more important. New optimisation problems (production / transport, for example) appear highly combinatorial. Of course, the context of sustainable development makes it even more critical because these transport activities emit high CO2 and beyond the optimisation of current architectures, more structural reflections on new organisations and more generally transport chain logistics are critical.

Note that this issue of the collaboration of actors is widely distributed in this part of the flagship projects of the Grenoble site plan for the campus. Indeed in the project PILSI (International Center Software and Intelligent Systems), a working group focuses on the "Open Software Organisations". It is interesting to see these collaborations between actors rather in terms of software tools. This theme is also strongly present in the project and the federal structure INNOVACS associated, this time in terms of new organisations to implement.