Deliverables A strategic roadmap for defining distributed engineering workspaces of the futurebiquitous and integrated teamwork environment Advances in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), global competition and customer demand for more sophisticated, safer, customised and environmentally friendly products are forcing change in European engineering sectors. Due to global competition, these engineering sectors in Europe are now under severe pressure to reduce the lead-time and cost for new products and also to improve their quality and their customer-and market-responsiveness. Many European engineering companies have, and are continuing to, establish partnerships with international players and work as Extended Enterprises adopting Concurrent Engineering practices to respond to the global competition. However, such Extended Enterprises have a need for sophisticated ICT-based working environments which overcome the barriers, such as geographical separation between teams, promote social interaction necessary for team work, provide transparent access to computing power and appropriate design tools and intuitive interfaces for assessing designs from various design perspectives. It is inevitable that, over the next 10 years, such demands will force many companies to adopt new forms of workspaces which support tighter integration with geographically dispersed business partners and virtual interfaces which allow efficient collaborative working and promote social interaction between remote team members. Emerging advances in technologies such as networking (Grid, wireless), high performance computing, virtual reality collaborative interfaces and simulation technologies will undoubtedly influence and make significant step changes to future workspaces for engineering practice. Rationale: The rationale behind this roadmap project was to define a shared collective "European Vision" of future workspaces and to guide future IST research to address problems currently faced by the European Union engineering industry and to contribute to a "growth-based" sustainable development. However, establishing a "European Vision" of future workspaces requires the collaboration of key European players. The nature of the work involved in creating collaborative engineering workspaces requires multidisciplinary and multifunctional technical expertise and input from industry across Europe. It requires inclusive discussion between various stakeholders and experts across Europe including engineering and construction companies, human factors experts and technologists from many areas such as virtual environments, distributed systems, communications, network security, multi-modal interfaces etc. Mission: The mission of this roadmap project was to define the 2013 European Vision of Collaborative Engineering Workspaces of the Future and to identify future research challenges in implementing this collective vision by bringing together key players across Europe. This project focused on the aerospace, automotive and building construction sectors, and the concept of Collaborative Engineering Workspaces of the Future is driven by end-user demands, user-centred design and technological, economical and social needs. The concept of Collaborative Engineering Workspaces of the Future is being developed to increase the competitiveness of EU engineering companies in the global marketplace, whilst at the same time supporting sustainable development in the knowledge economy. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
