OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE EUROPEAN CERTIFICATION OF THE INTEGRATED DESIGNER PROFESSION

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1 ModTech International Conference - New face of TMCR Modern Technologies, Quality and Innovation - New face of TMCR 20-22th May 2010 OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE EUROPEAN CERTIFICATION OF THE INTEGRATED DESIGNER PROFESSION George Drăghici 1, Anca Drăghici 1, Andreas Riel 2, Serge Tichkiewitch 2,3, Damian Grajewski 4 & Richard Messnarz 5 1 Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania, Integrated Engineering Research Centre 2 Grenoble University of Technology, France, G-SCOP Laboratory 3 European Manufacturing and Innovation Research Association a cluster leading excellence, Belgium 4 Poznan University of Technology, Poland, Virtual Design and Automation Centre 5 ISCN GmbH, Graz, Austria Abstract: The paper presents the European Certification and Qualification Association, the evaluation and certification procedure, and then the content of the training program for the qualification and certification of the Integrated Designer job role (based on a defined skill card). The integrated design training program is based on 7 skill units: the Reasons for Integration in Design, the Targets of Integration in Design, Essential Methods of Integration in Design, Mastering Complexity in Integrated Design, Collaborative Integrated Design, and Selected Aspects of Integration. These skill units have been detailed in skill elements and corresponding performance criteria. Finally, the main opportunities for Romanian students are presented taking into consideration the ECQA schema and the defined training program. Key words: European certification, integrated design, skills, training program 1. INTRODUCTION In the last years, European universities are confronted with the Bologna Process implementation that implies the education process reform by considering 3 cycles: license, master and PhD (doctoral studies). Each country tries to adapt this restructuring process to its own needs. In Romania, for the case of the technical high education there has been adopted a structure of the subsequent cycles and there have been defined the domains (fields) and corresponding specializations. These were analyzed and certified by the National Council for Academic Evaluation and Accreditation (CNEAA) and the education processes quality evaluation and the qualification certification have been evaluated, recognized by the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in High Education (ARACIS, and the National Agency for the High Education Qualification and Partnership with the Economic and Social Environment (ACPART). In Europe there are many evaluation, qualification Corresponding author: George Drăghici, gdraghici@eng.upt.ro (12 pt) and certification bodies. One of them is the European Certification and Qualification Association (ECQA), and Politehnica University of Timisoara is member of this association. Integrated Designer is one of the professions certified by ECQA, as a result of a Leonardo da Vinci project (idesigner, 2009) that brings together specialists from European Manufacturing and Innovation Research Association a cluster leading excellence (EMIRAcle). The paper will briefly present the ECQA, the evaluation and certification procedure, and then the content of the designed training program for the qualification and certification of the Integrated Designer job role. 2. EUROPEAN CERTIFICATION AND QUALIFICATION ASSOCIATION ROLE The European Certification and Qualification Association is the result of a number of EU supported initiatives in the last ten years where in the EU Life Long Learning Program different educational developers decided to follow a joint process for the persons from industry certification. Through the ECQA it becomes possible to attend courses for a specific profession in one country and perform a Europe-wide agreed test at the end of the course. The certificate will be recognized by European training organizations and institutions in 18 member countries (ECQA, 2010). Why is such a Certificate of Interest? European work forces are highly flexible and need to work for industries across Europe. Imagine that you are attending a course in one country and that you perform and pass the exam at the end of the course. The certificate will then be recognized by certifiers and training organizations in all European countries (e.g.: France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Scandinavian countries, all Eastern European countries etc.) This

2 will automatically lead to a higher recognition of the certificate and higher chances of working for customers in an open European market (ECQA, 2000). What are the aims of the Association? (1) ECQA activities provide the organization for certification and accreditation of new job roles (professions), training organizations, trainers and examination bodies and the co-operation of those entities on a regional, national and transnational level, in order to: (a) foster the accreditation, update and release of new job roles (professions) to be accepted into the job pool to achieve a higher qualification in the international labor market using an accreditation, test and certification system; (b) Support regional and/or transnational skills assessment and testing by using an accreditation portal for Europe; (c) Provide the backbone for the accreditation of training organizations, trainers, examination bodies and certificate issuance for all members. (2) ECQA promotes and supports the certification and accreditation process of job roles for businesses and higher education institutions on a regional, national, and transnational level. (3) ECQA supports and validates new developments within the member network and beyond. (4) The running of the skills assessment, test and accreditation portal for certification and examination bodies will lead to a higher level of trainings and trainers and better qualification of participants in Europe. (5) The experiences will also be disseminated amongst other European partners(-hips). Especially individual trainees will benefit from the outcome of the activities. Politehnica University of Timisoara is the training provider on the Certified Integrated Designer profession in Romania. 3. THE IMPLEMENTED LEARNING AND COURSE DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM The implemented learning and course development system is represented in figure 1 (Riel et al., 2009), (Draghici et al., 2009). Fig. 1. The Implemented Learning and Course Development System [2], [6] The Implemented Learning - User level: Learner 1. Participants (Learners) log into the Capability Adviser, browse the skills tree, assess their skills against performance criteria, upload evidences to prove their skills, and print a skills profile. 2. Participants (Learners) select the Learning Steps option the Capability Adviser, access recommended learning references, and can call Sign In to log into courses on the Moodle web based training server system. 3. Users (Learners) on the Moodle System, attend the courses, perform exercises, upload homework results, and receive feedback from the trainer. 4. Users (Learners) switch to the Capability Adviser window (if you did all in one session) or log into Capability adviser as participant and upload their homework results as evidence into the system to prove their competence. The Implemented Accreditation Process - User level: Assessor/Accreditation Body 5. Users (Learners) inform Assessors. Formal Assessors log into the Capability Adviser, assess the evidences, assess the performance criteria, and produce a formal skills profile of the user. The results of the formal assessor display separately. The Implemented Course and Skills Development System - User level: Course and Skills Developer/

3 Administrator - Course Developers (Trainers, Accreditation Institutions, etc.) log into an e-working space where course material development work can be shared in a team. The system offers team management, working scenarios, version control, and an interface to: 6. Export the training and reference materials in the Moodle based training system. 7. Enter and administer a skill card online, which forms the basis for step 1 in Figure INTEGRATED DESIGN TRAINING PROGRAM The successful and sustainable products design is increasingly linked to mastering the challenge of the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of modern products in an integrated fashion from the very earliest phases of product development. Design engineers are increasingly confronted with the need to master several different engineering disciplines in order to get a sufficient understanding of a product or service. Competence in the major aspects of the whole product lifecycle is a key element of the skills they require to be able to conceive a product design that fulfils the requirements of all the different actors involved in the product s lifecycle as well as the constraints imposed by their individual environments. The Integrated Designer qualification and certification addresses itself at experienced design engineers who want to complement and/or certify their advanced design skills. The students typically aim at a senior or principal engineer position in their design teams, but also for managing positions. The certificate, however, is not supposed to certify the student s capabilities as a design team manager. One of the biggest challenges is to conceive a training program that covers the complete skills set in a maximum of three weeks (idesigner, 2010). Fig. 2. The skills card of the idesigner qualification and certification program [4] Figure 2 shows the skill set/card knowledge map which provides the basis of our development activities. It is the initial consolidation result of our experiences in research, education, and in collaboration with industry. Also, the skill set is stable at this moment. The content of each skill element and the exercises can be improved with the feedback from partners in industry and academia and from students of initial training seminars (idesigner, 2010), (Riel et al., 2009). Each skill unit will be briefly presented in the following. 4.1 The Reasons for Integration in Design This unit deals with the motivation for the paradigm of Integrated Design for Innovative and Competitive Product Development. a) Understanding Competitive Design - The element describes the key importance of design for creating products that are competitive on increasingly global and fast-evolving markets. b) Understanding Design Externalization and Outsourcing - As products are becoming more and

4 more complex design tasks require globally distributed design teams of experts. Working in such networks of experts this demands special skills and competences. The element focuses on the reasons for the need of design tasks externalization and outsourcing, and gives an overview of the competence requirements implications. c) Understanding Modern Design Environments have to support the key aspects of integrated design, which are essentially centered on the support of the collaboration and knowledge sharing of experts from different domains during the design tasks. This element gives an overview of those key aspects, and uses examples of cutting-edge environments to show their realization. d) Understanding Innovation by Design element focuses on the importance of design to innovate products. Due to the fact that design is a key element of the earliest phases of the product development process, it has a crucial influence on the innovative character of the final product. Integrated Designers have to be able to collect and implement requirements of all the stakeholders into the product. e) Understanding Product and System Complexity element deals with the notion of complexity in the context of modern products. It highlights different definitions and means to measure complexity. 4.2 The Targets of Integration in Design a) Integrating the whole Life-cycle of a Product or a System - Knowledge about the life-cycle of a product is the key to identifying and understanding the requirements a product is confronted with throughout its entire life from design over usage to disposal and recycling. Even if specific products run through their specific life-cycles, there are certain phases and characteristics that are common to those life-cycles. This element deals with concept as product lifecycles with the target to establish the basis for understanding the variety and the complexity of requirements on integration activities and the way of integration thinking in integrated design activities. b) Integrating the different Stakeholders of the Lifecycle - The probably most important element of every product life-cycle is its stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who are actively or passively, directly or indirectly involved in one or several phases of the whole product life-cycle, from conception to disposal and recycling. Evidently, all these people come from several different domains such as research, engineering, business, marketing, politics, etc. Similarly they can assume different roles such as developers, producers, users, vendors, etc. The key issue about these people is that they all impose specific requirements, expectations and preferences to the product, which the Integrated Designer should be aware of. The target of this element is thus to identify the most typical and important stakeholders of the product life-cycle, their potential roles, functions and influences with respect to the product. The goal for the Integrated Design Engineer is to be able to identify as completely as possible all potential sources of requirements to the product design c) Integrating the different Cultures of the Stakeholders - Involving people with different competences, expertise, and roles can be very challenging. In typical product design organizations, designers are supposed to procure themselves with key information from those stakeholders. This requires competences in communication and in particular knowledge about the different cultures of stakeholders. This element points out this need and gives an overview of relevant key issues. 4.3 Essential Methods of Integration in Design Knowledge about the reasons for the necessity of the integrated design application, as well as about the essential entities to be integrated is the prerequisite to understand different approaches to the holistic design process. This unit deals with cutting-edge methods that have significant importance in integrated design, which have been proven both in scientific research and in industrial environments. The target of this type of training is that students understand these methods to the extent that they are themselves able to apply them to their own design tasks, as well as to select the best means to improve their knowledge and skills about them in a more specific and focused type of training and/or study. a) Concurrent Engineering method is still a relatively new design management system, but has had the opportunity to mature in recent years to become a well-defined systems approach towards optimizing engineering design cycles. Because of this, concurrent engineering has garnered much attention from industry and has been implemented in a multitude of companies, organizations and universities (Tichkiewitch & Brissaud, 2004). The basic premise for concurrent engineering revolves around two concepts. The first is the idea that all elements of a product s life-cycle, from functionality, productivity, assembly, testability, maintenance issues, environmental impact and finally disposal and recycling, should be taken into careful consideration in the early design phases. The second concept is that the preceding design activities should all be occurring at the same time, or concurrently. The overall goal being that the concurrent nature of these processes significantly increases productivity and product quality, aspects that are obviously important in today's fast-paced market. This philosophy has become a key to the success of concurrent engineering because it allows for errors and redesigns to be discovered early in the design process when the project is still in a more abstract and possibly digital realm. By locating and fixing these issues early, the design team can avoid what often become costly errors as the project moves to

5 more complicated computational models and eventually into the physical realm (Tichkiewitch & Brissaud, 2004). b) Just-need Approach basically signifies that each stakeholder involved in the integrated design process is supposed to impose a design constraint on the product or system as soon as the stakeholder can prove that constraint. This assures that the space of potential design solutions is restricted step by step by only those constraints, which hold and can be verified and validated during and after the design process. This element deals with concepts and examples about this approach, as well as with tools that help apply it. c) Product Modeling is increasingly used to tackle the complexity of modern products and systems. It aims at providing a complete representation of the product or the system in the form of modules and their relationships. This element looks at different modern approaches to product modeling, as well as modeling tools and languages. 4.4 Mastering Complexity in Integrated Design Nowadays mechanics can no longer control and repair a car with their own competences in mechanics and technology. Today, a car is so complex that we need to merge competences in mechanics, electronics, computer sciences, automation, etc. to be able to understand a minimum before starting to repair it. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed. Issues such as logistics, the coordination of different teams, and automatic control of machinery become more difficult when dealing with large, complex projects (Riel et al., 2009). Systems engineering deals with work-processes and tools to handle such projects, and it overlaps with both technical and human-centered disciplines such as control engineering and project management. Systems Engineering focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, and then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem: the system life-cycle. Depending on their application, although there are several models that are used in the industry, all of them aim to identify the relation between the various stages mentioned above and incorporate feedback. Examples of such models include the Waterfall model and the VEE model. System development often requires contribution from diverse technical disciplines. By providing a systems (holistic) view of the development effort, systems engineering helps meld all the technical contributors into a unified team effort, forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production to operation and, in some cases, to termination and disposal. This unit focuses on the key role that design has in systems engineering with a focus on systems that should be turned into successful products on the market. a) Integration as a Means to master Complexity is a key factor of Systems Engineering. b) Functional Re-Use aware Design Principles - One of the major questions in product and systems engineering is how to create a proven in use stable architecture which can be re-used and adapted for many and customers on the market. This requires a lot more than just re-using one component, it requires an architectural paradigm. Generic and adaptable product architectures are created in design where interfaces become fixed and components are exchangeable. Beside the exchangeability of the components in the platforms it is possible to adapt by so called parameter settings. The same functions for a customer are parameterized and thus fulfill some different adapted purpose. The result is a stable architecture with exchangeable components and which can be adapted to different customer specific functions by parameter (configurations) settings. This element teach student about typical generic re-use and platform centered architectural design strategies. c) Requirements Engineering in Integrated Design - Systematic requirements analysis is also known as requirements engineering. It is sometimes referred to loosely by names such as requirements gathering, requirements capture, or requirements specification. The term requirements analysis can also be applied specifically to the analysis proper, as opposed to elicitation or documentation of the requirements, for instance. Requirement engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering and software engineering that is focus on determining the products and systems goals, functions and constraints. In some life-cycle models, the requirements engineering process begins with feasibility study activity, which leads to a feasibility report. If the feasibility study suggests that the product should be developed, then requirement analysis can begin. If requirement analysis precedes feasibility studies, which may foster outside the box thinking, then feasibility should be determined before requirements are finalized. Design Engineers are an integral part of the Requirements Engineering process. Furthermore, quality standards emphasize the traceability of requirements and their mapping against acceptance criteria and tests. In most engineering processes even the lowest quality levels can no longer be achieved without implementing requirements tracing systems. Modern quality standards (ISO 15504, SPICE) typically define several layers of requirements, such as Customer Requirements, System Requirements (mapped onto system elements), Component Requirements (housing, hydraulic system, oil pump, etc.), Software Requirements, etc. Among these types, they also distinguish between component and system

6 requirements. These types of requirements are mapped onto the different test level, which provides the basis for the validation of the conceived product or system. This element teaches Requirements Management principles inspired by the discipline where it is considered to be most maturely developed: Software Engineering (Riel et al., 2009). d) Design Thinking for Innovation - Design Thinking is a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. A core issue intimacy linked to this methodology is that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, used, and supported. Design Thinking is thus essentially about involving Design Engineers into the life-cycle of a product or a system, even in the case of a completely new development. Design Thinking has been coined by the leading authority in Design Research; the Stanford University in California, USA, and it has been adopted by leading design companies all over the world. This element conveys the elements of this essential method, which aims at maximizing the creativity of designers while making them consequently, respect the requirements and constraints imposed by the lifecycle the product or system is supposed to run through. 4.5 Knowledge Management for Integration Engineering design is a knowledge-based, knowledge-intensive intellectual activity. Designers and others involved in the design of any product or process bring to bear extensive technical knowledge, product knowledge, manufacturing process knowledge, design process knowledge, memories of previous projects, and so forth. Much of this knowledge is presently ad hoc and heuristic, residing implicitly with individuals or within organizations and neither accessible to, nor of a form that is easily accessible by, others within the firm, much less in other firms or disciplines. The handbooks, textbooks, catalogues, trade journals, research journals, and company guidelines in which much of this knowledge has been recorded are generally useful only if close at hand (some say within reach ) and if they deal specifically with the designer's current problem. As a data base, this collection is extremely inefficient in terms of accessibility (Bernard & Tichkiewitch, 2008). A design knowledge base more generally and completely accessible to all engineering designers would be tremendously powerful. For this vision to be realized, existing knowledge must be captured, organized and, where possible, generalized. Once this is done, the knowledge might be made available to designers via CAD systems or computer networks in a form which is adequate to support design engineers in a maximum of tasks efficiently. Every phase of this process is very complex, as they all deal with originally implicit knowledge. As both the knowledge providers, as well as the final target users are design engineers, they should be able to participate in this process as much as possible, which requires a basic understanding of the motivation and targets of knowledge management for product design. Furthermore, professional seminars allow professional users to exchange related experiences, which is particularly essential for the improvement of existing and upcoming approaches to knowledge management in product creation. It is of utmost importance that Design Engineers are aware of the importance of their own contributions to Knowledge Management and Sharing in the Organization, and more specifically in the Design Team (Bernard & Tichkiewitch, 2008). a) Formalization of Knowledge learning element teaches ways that lead to the formalization of knowledge, which is the necessary basis for knowledge capitalization and sharing. b) Capitalization on Knowledge - This element seeks to qualify Integrated Designers to capitalize on knowledge acquired in certain domains, for design tasks on other domains, as well as for variants in the same domains. c) Sharing of Knowledge - Once Design Knowledge can be formalized, and transformed from one domain into others, the key of successful organizations is in their capability of sharing design knowledge within the organization. Successful implementation of this builds on each Design Engineer s competences in Knowledge Sharing methods, tools and its advantages for the individual designers and the whole organization (Bernard & Tichkiewitch, 2008). d) Contextualization of Knowledge - Knowledge that has been formalized can be capitalized on and shared, but it has to be put into the context of a specific project and process environment in order to be applicable in an optimal way. This element points out the key issues for the contextualization of knowledge. 4.6 Collaborative Integrated Design Current engineering design process typically involves more than one designer. In many cases there will be a team of designers (people who are experts in different specialties and/or belong to different cultures) participating in the design, along with the corresponding clients/users. When a product is designed through the collective and joint efforts of many designers, the design process can be called as collaborative design. This work has to be done by taking into consideration the product life-cycle by including dispersed functions such as design, manufacturing, assembly, test, quality and purchasing as well as those from suppliers and customers. The main goals of such a collaborative design team include optimizing the mechanical function of the product, minimizing the production or assembly

7 costs, or ensuring that the product can be easily and economically serviced and maintained etc. Since a collaborative design team often works in parallels and independently using different engineering tools distributed in separate locations, even across various time zones around the world, the resulting design process may then be called distributed collaborative design (Draghici et al., 2009), (Tichkiewitch & Brissaud, 2004). Collaborative design issues come up due to different groups of people, often with different expertise in accord with the product life-cycle phases (like design engineers, technological design engineers, manufacturing engineers, marketing experts, logistics experts, accouters or economist specialists, service and maintenance specialists, recycling specialists etc.) and that can belong to different enterprises, at different places, but having to work together in a specific product design process. Designing complex products and systems requires a tremendous collection of expertise, knowledge, technology and tools. Design resources are often distributed. Participants may be in different places as well. Integrated concurrent product development is realized by leveraging modern information and communication technology (ICT) to coordinate people, processes, tools and technologies. Companies (SME more often) and medium-sized suppliers are looking for an inexpensive way for geographically dispersed teams to jointly develop products together over the Internet (Draghici et al., 2009). This unit deals with some important skill elements in the context of such distributed collaborative design team scenarios. a) Design Process Moderation - In the collaborative design process, actors have to interact not only in a virtual environment but also in face-to-face project meeting. In both cases, the technical discourse is focus on argumentation of the design solutions, constrains and requirements or of the project development phases. The group leader has to be able to moderate the discussions and to plan the meeting, but also, to respect the terms and conditions. Argumentation and moderation are skills related to the negotiation capacity of the designer. In this element the student learns about the particularities of the moderation process in the case of the integrated engineering process. b) Working in Distributed Engineering Teams skill element is dedicated to the human working interactions training. The focus is on obtaining efficiency and effectiveness in the design team. c) Communication with Experts from different Domains learning element the student learns about the particularities of the communication in distributed engineering teams that are typically composed of experts from several different domains (Draghici et al., 2009). 4.7 Selected Aspects of Integration This unit uses real-world case studies from different industrial sectors in order to teach principles of Integrated Design in specific contexts. It is meant to be an extensible case studies pool to be used by trainers according to a specific target audience. a) Integration of Risk Considerations in Design - This element teaches principles about the systematic integration of risk considerations in the design of products and systems. b) Integrated Design in Wood Furniture Industry - This is a case study of cooperative integrated design in the wood furniture industry, which points out as a key success factor the systematic integration of different experts during the early product development phases. c) Integrated Safety Design in the Automotive Industry element studies the key competences required to integrate safety considerations systematically into product and system design. It is focused on automotive embedded systems. d) Life-cycle Assessment in Integrated Design learning element focuses on the systematic impact assessment throughout the product life-cycle during the design phase. e) Sustainable Integrated Design element focuses on the consideration of sustainability factors in terms of environmental, economical and societal aspects. f) Test and Quality Driven Integrated Design element deals with key issues about designing products with testability and quality assurance in mind all along the development process. g) Virtual Techniques to support the Integrated Design Process element discusses some selected virtual technologies which designers are typically confronted with in modern design environments, and which integrated designers are supposed to be able to capitalize on. 5. CONCLUSIONS The paper has presented the ECQA schema and its functionalities for the certification of different professions in Europe. Integrated Design Engineer is one of the professions certified by ECQA. The implemented learning and course development procedures can easily be used (Moodle platform for learning and examination) by business, industrial and academic users (students, trainers, course developer). The described integrated design training program is based on 7 skill units: the Reasons for Integration in Design, the Targets of Integration in Design, Essential Methods of Integration in Design, Mastering Complexity in Integrated Design, Collaborative Integrated Design, and Selected Aspects of Integration. These skill units have been detailed in skill elements and corresponding performance criteria. The presented structure and the content of the training program is the result of many

8 virtual meetings and project meetings of the specialists involved in the idesigner project. The certification procedure allows total and partial certificates. The competencies planned to be trained are complementary to the general master programs in the field of manufacturing or design engineering. The main opportunities from the European certification of the integrated designer profession in the case of Romania are: (1) It offers the possibility for having a EU certificate (total or partial) for the students that follow the training program and pass the examination process successfully (more than 70% of the answers are correct) together with the master diploma. This certificate offers them complementary competencies, compatible on the EU labor market (e.g. students can be easy integrated them self in multinational companies in Romania or in other companies in Europe). This opportunity can be attractive for PhD.- students and young researchers, too; (2) This qualification and certification opportunity can be used by the engineers employed in industrial companies that want to update and develop their knowledge in the integrated design field for better align themselves to the new trends (new processes and new requirements); (3) The different skill units of the training program can be introduced in some master program courses (in their syllabus) and so, students can be easy trained for being certified. Professors from academia can become ECQA trainers for idesigner profession; (4) The Romanian master programs in the field of industrial and manufacturing engineering can obtain an European dimension and they can be more attractive for the potential students; (5) Universities or other training bodies can become collaborators of the ECQA and they can benefit from the established schema and experience gained. The dissemination plan of the idesigner training program will be implemented and tested first through the National Research Network for Integrated Product and Process Engineering (INPRO) with the implication of the master students from the universities from Timisoara, Bucharest, Sibiu, Brasov, Iasi, Bacau, Suceava and Oradea by using the video-conference system s facilities. The presented paper is linked with the research activities of the project Certified Integrated Design Engineer idesigner (Leonardo da Vinci contract LLP-LdV-TOI-2008-FR ), founded with the European Commission support. The presentation of this paper is connected with the deucert project (Dissemination of European Certification Schema ECQA, LLP AT-KA4-KA4MP contract), that is funded with support from the European Commission. This paper reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. 6. REFERENCES 1. Bernard, A. & Tichkiewitch, S. (2008), Methods and Tools for Effective Knowledge Life-Cycle- Management, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, ISBN Draghici, G.; Draghici, A.; Riel, A.; Tichkiewitch, S. & Messnarz, R. (2009). European Certification of the Integrated Design Engineer, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Management of Technological Changes, vol.2, pp , ISBN: , Alexandroupolis, September 2009, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece 3. ECQA (2010). European Certification and Qualification Association, Available from: Accessed: 16/04/ idesigner (2010). Certified Integrated Design Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci project/contract LLP- LdV-TOI-2008-FR , Available from: php?id=47, Accessed: 16/04/ Riel A.; Tichkiewitch S.; Grajewski D.; Weiss Z.; Draghici A.; Draghici G. & Messnarz R. (2009). Qualification and Certification of Life Cycle Engineering Skills of Design Engineers, Proceedings of the 16th CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering LCE 2009, CD-ROM, ISBN , May 2009, Cairo, Egypt 6. Riel A.; Tichkiewitch S.; Grajewski D.; Weiss Z.; Draghici A.; Draghici G. & Messnarz R. (2009). Formation and Certification of Integrated Design Engineering Skills, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference in Engineering Design (ICED 09), Vol. 10, Design Education and Lifelong Learning. The Design Society, pp , ISBN , Stanford University, August 2009, Stanford, CA, USA 7. Tichkiewitch, S. & Brissaud, D. (2004). Tools for Co-operative and Integrated Design, Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN