Concurrent engineering: The DARPA initiative: encouraging new industrial practices

The DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering (DICE), is a program launched in 1988 by the US Dept. of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to encourage the practice of concurrent engineering in the US military and industrial base. The overall goal is to develop an architecture for concurrent engineering in which the people working on a project can instantly communicate with each other and access, share, and store up-to-date information in a transient way, unhindered by geographic separation, organizational structure, product complexity, or incompatible tools, databases, and computing resources. The concurrent engineering services are being developed in conjunction with several pilot projects. All the project members belong to 'tiger teams', interdisciplinary groups that rove across traditional department boundaries, communicating their insights, making recommendations, and negotiating conflicts.<
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