Media-assisted product and process traceability in supply chain engineering

Many engineering domains involve an intricate interplay of conceptual synthesis of alternative requirements and design configurations, preliminary impact analysis of these alternatives using complex simulations and multimedia visualizations, and human decision-making. Design traceability in such settings must be both product-oriented and process-oriented: it must enable an efficient media-based comparison of product alternatives from the current project or related experiences, and it must facilitate reuse of modeling experiences to avoid unnecessary repetition of negative experiences. We have studied these problems in a large interdisciplinary project whose aim it is to optimize supply chains linking chemical engineering, plastics engineering, and related application demands e.g. in the automotive industry. A number of novel experience reuse tools have been designed and implemented as part of a process-integrated modeling environment.