Development of Advanced Collaborative Engineering Environments (CEEs) Sponsor Jet Propulsion Lab/NASA - Pasadena, California Phase 0 & Phase 1: CEE-based Stackup Design Tool (2000-2001) Current engineering computing environments can be characterized as largely disjoint sets of tools that exchange information via labor-intensive processes.  While some progress has been made, a good deal of engineering knowledge is not available in effective electronic forms, and interoperability among engineering processes is less than optimum. For example, today engineers still often manually add numerous notes and sketches to CAD drawings.  In spite of being in an electronic form, these notes and sketches are in a relatively low-level representation that is not easily processed by downstream tools.  They are primarily intended for human consumption.  These items typically require manual intervention and re-creation downstream, resulting in increased labor efforts and transcriptions errors.  Thus, there is a great need to capture the higher level concepts behind these items  (e.g., PWB stackup design intent) in semantically rich knowledge containers.  Associativity with other types of information is also needed (e.g., other rich objects that exist in some current CAD tools).  This Phase 1 effort is aimed at a) developing a general methodology and computing framework for capturing this ancillary information, and b) implementing a prototype PWB stackup tool in this framework to demonstrate this approach. Phase 1 helps JPL/NASA move along the roadmap defined in Phase 0 to achieve a next-generation collaborative engineering environment.  The target environment will leverage advances in engineering information technology, including standards like STEP, to achieve fine-grain, modular interoperability among design objects and related tools.  Techniques based on efforts including Georgia Tech CAD-CAE integration research will be applied and enhanced, and new approaches will be developed as needed.  The target outcome is a virtual collaborative engineering environment which increases product life cycle effectiveness by an order of magnitude or greater. Phase 2 (2001-2002) (Information from this phase has not been publically released yet.) References Engineering Frameworks Interest Group (EFWIG) R. Peak. An AP210-based Repository for Collaborative Electronics Engineering, 2001 NASA STEP for Aerospace Workshop, Thursday January 18 Session. Development of Advanced Collaborative Engineering Environments (CEEs) - Phase 1 Overview. August 29-31, 2001. Engineering frameworks overview presentation. Progress on methodologies for creating gap-filling applications, including "smart" figures and notes.