CoSpaces

Engineers in the European automotive, aerospace and construction industries are renowned for innovation, quality and reliability in the products they design and manufacture. Maintaining this competitive edge while meeting ever increasing market expectations and cost pressures is what the CoSpaces project was all about.

The CoSpaces project developed a novel software platform to support product design and manufacturing in geographically dispersed teams in distributed virtual engineering enterprises. It helps the team member to participate in decision-making, view designs, propose modifications, and access reference material in ways that are specific to their disciplines, and allow them to interact using a range of devices depending on their current location and situation.

The main tasks of the CoSpaces project were:

• Evaluation of collaboration practices;
• Creation of an innovative distributed software framework;
• Validation of the distributed software framework in industry workspaces.

FIT’s contributions to CoSpaces included competences in knowledge support and group management systems, mobile and augmented reality systems.

Three industry workspaces were developed for validating applications from the automotive, aerospace and construction industries. There will be a workspace each for distributed design, co-located design, and mobile services.

The CoSpaces project was funded in part by the European Commission.