The project contributes towards the evolution of an Information Society through the development of Advisor systems technology and the resulting exploitation of product and advisor guidelines - published on the emerging Information Superhighway.


This project will deliver and implementation of a groupware system which goes beyond the current state-of-the-art in PCB design systems.
The groupware will support concurrent codesign, by a product development team, of a PCB and the processes by which it will be manufactured, tested deployed, and maintained. The groupware will significantly reduce product cost and time-to-market by providing PCB designers with advice based on downstream phases of the PCB life-cycle.
The project will validate the groupware in commercial design environments. The user partners have committed to use the system on real production designs and, if successful, to adopt it into their design departments. The results will be delivered to the market. The vendor partner has committed that the successful aspects of the groupware implementation will be progressively incorporated into its CAD products.
The project has strong user input. The final delivered implementation will be based on (a) concurrent engineering guidelines specified by the user partners and (b) their evaluation of a series of prototypes developed during the life of the project.