Methode agile pour la conception collaborative multidisciplinaire de systemes integres: Application a la mecatronique

This work focuses on the multidisciplinary and collaborative design of integrated systems. These systems are subject to an ever increasing number of requirements, leading to the need for more comprehensive functional and spatial integration. These different types of product integration are also at the origin of organizational complexity. This complexity arises not only from the great number of actors performing various engineering activities but also from the diversity of disciplines involved (designated in this manuscript as "multidisciplinary integration"). To encourage this multidisciplinary integration, "preliminary design" and "detailed design" have been identified as the most significant steps, especially since they are characterized by the collaboration of multiple experts handling a large number of product definition' technical data.;Systems that have been designed thanks to multidisciplinary approaches are generally poorly integrated. This is partially due to the compartmentalization of disciplines, as well as to the "project-planned" method, where project planning is predominant and information is mainly spread out "top-down". To ensure better cooperation between the various disciplines, to enable decision ma king based on operational indicators and to analyze and understand the multidisciplinary integration processes, a method inspired by the founding principles of agile methods (the agile manifesto) is proposed for the collaborative design of integrated systems.;This work is based on three complementary concepts. The first is, the Collaborative Actions Framework, an operational framework for collaboration around actions. One objective of this framework is to improve the collaboration among designers, whatever their disciplinary origin. It also ensures traceability between decision making and corrections/changes made to technical data. This traceability is made possible by the use of the second concept, called Workspace. Even if this term is already well known, we propose a new definition/usage to transform it into collaboration spaces. This concept offers great possibilities, including the continuous delivering/sharing of experts' contributions, multidisciplinary integration and change validation. The exchange of technical data between workspaces, or simultaneous work on the same data, relies on the ability to manage several parallel versions of the same item into a single data management system. These opportunities are offered by the third concept, called Branch & Merge.;Finally, these three concepts are illustrated through a scenario and a computer prototype. A mechatronic product, "the synergistic combination of mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, and information technology" (Harashima et al., 1996), is used to illustrate the opportunities offered by our work in terms of multidisciplinary integration during collaborative design.