Studies and Educational Activities in a Simultaneous Collaborative Engineering Setting - Recommendations and Lessons Learn

Kurzfassung

Early 2020, the COVID pandemic spread throughout the world, disrupting the way organizations and individuals had been working until then and forcing them to rapidly adjust to a remote working environment. Given the collocated nature of the Concurrent Engineering (CE) methodology, the COVID protecting measures and protocols –such as physical distancing and the limitations on the number of people that could gather in a closed space– also heavily impacted the viability of executing CE activities in Concurrent Engineering Centers (CEC’s). More particularly, DLR’s strong support to the German national containment strategy meant that, between early 2020 and 2022, conventional CE activities could not be carried out at DLR’s Concurrent Engineering Facility (CEF). Faced with this situation, the desire to continue carrying out team activities (i.e., workshops / concurrent design) and providing educational activities for the University of Bremen (i.e., compulsory courses in Systems Engineering and Concurrent Engineering for the Master in Space Engineering) drove us towards an organic transition into a simultaneous Collaborative Engineering approach. At the same time, exploring these new methods is in keeping with DLR’s efforts in advancing the digitization of the design processes, some of which are currently being implemented within a larger project for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action with our participation. By using many of the same methods and work structures we commonly apply in CEF activities and adapting them to a remote environment, we have managed to conduct some rather successful studies, workshops and courses during this time. From this work, some recommendations and lessons learnt that could be useful to other teams facing similar challenges now or in the future have been derived. In this paper, we introduce the corresponding activities, how we conduced them, and the insights we gained in the process.