Capturing design rationale in concurrent engineering teams

DRCS, a design rationale capture system that provides an integrated and generic framework for capturing rationale in team contexts, is discussed. Its underlying rationale language is based both on previous work in decision-rationale capture and on a generic model of design reasoning. The language is designed to capture all important aspects of design decisions and their interrelationships in a natural way. DRCS itself explores how to enhance design systems so that they will support collaborative editing of designs and their rationale     

Negotiation in a knowledge-based concurrent engineering design environment

Abstract: Computational support for concurrent engineering design presents a number of issues in the design of knowledge-based systems. A fundamental concern is the need to provide the life-cycle perspective in recommending design alternatives. It is argued that such a complex knowledge-based system should be distributed, due to the inherent problems with large knowledge bases and the maintenance of consistency. Inconsistent local views of a problem and different priorities on design issues are expected between different knowledge-based design perspectives. These inconsistencies and different priorities will lead inherently to conflict which has to be resolved. This paper addresses the issues and key variables in conflict resolution and presents a strategy that can be applied for managing the conflict resolution process. We propose negotiation as the method of analysing a conflict situation, applying an appropriate conflict resolution strategy and monitoring its performance. We present an overview of the nature of conflict and some conflict resolution strategies, and see in what situations certain strategies are appropriate.     

面向并行工程的虚拟样机设计方法研究

虚拟样机是一种能够反映实际产品特性的数字化模型,可有效支持并行工程和并行设计。在分析了虚拟样机与并行工程关系的基础上,提出了基于虚拟样机的产品研发方法,并阐述了虚拟样机设计方法一体化解决方案。     

Requirements for software-support in concurrent engineering teams

Team work is the customary type of labour organisation used in the framework of Concurrent Engineering (CE). It requires a suitable design of the supporting software. As a first step a model of Concurrent Engineering Team Effectiveness (CETEM) has been developed on the basis of a meta-analysis. Within the scope of an empirical study - which was actually meant to test this new model - guidelines for software-support in Concurrent Engineering Teams were derived. The study was designed as participative observation and continuous process mapping of ten different teams. Sixty-seven measurements were being conducted in team meetings in order to show a correlation between the described variables. Correlation and cluster analyses were utilised. On a super-ordinated management level project contents and objectives as well as their temporal and logical context should be mapped with the help of a workflow-system. On a more operational level in the team itself, degrees of freedom regarding temporal and logical sequence of activities can be accepted. Nevertheless, detailed planning concerning the contents of activities should take place with the assistance of groupware- or database-solutions.     

Requirements for software-support in concurrent engineering teams

Team work is the customary type of labour organisation used in the framework of Concurrent Engineering (CE). It requires a suitable design of the supporting software. As a first step a model of Concurrent Engineering Team Effectiveness (CETEM) has been developed on the basis of a meta-analysis. Within the scope of an empirical study - which was actually meant to test this new model - guidelines for software-support in Concurrent Engineering Teams were derived. The study was designed as participative observation and continuous process mapping of ten different teams. Sixty-seven measurements were being conducted in team meetings in order to show a correlation between the described variables. Correlation and cluster analyses were utilised. On a super-ordinated management level project contents and objectives as well as their temporal and logical context should be mapped with the help of a workflow-system. On a more operational level in the team itself, degrees of freedom regarding temporal and logical sequence of activities can be accepted. Nevertheless, detailed planning concerning the contents of activities should take place with the assistance of groupware- or database-solutions.     

集成虚拟现实环境在工程设计分析中的应用 *

虚拟现实技术在工程设计与分析上有很大的应用潜力。可是 ,虚拟环境的创建时间长、成本高,极大地限制了虚拟现实技术在工程上的应用。为此 ,提出了虚拟现实脚本生成器的概念,将虚拟现实技术与过程的设计、分析集成化,创造性地提出了一种自上而下的设计方法———VR-IEDA,以便高效、快速地创建虚拟原型,提高计算机虚拟复杂系统工程的性价比。在 VR-IEDA中复杂系统的结构和行为被计算机捕捉并自动生成可执行的 VR仿真代码 ,从而减少了创建虚拟环境的时间,便利了基于仿真的过程分析和设计。最后 ,以武器系统的维修过程为     

Institutional boundaries and trust of virtual teams in collaborative design: An experimental study in a virtual world environment

Members of virtual teams often collaborate within and across institutional boundaries. This research investigates the effects of boundary spanning conditions on the development of team trust and team satisfaction. Two hundred and eighty-two participants carried out a collaborative design task over several weeks in a virtual world, Second Life. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used to examine our research model, which compares individual level measurement between two boundary spanning team conditions. The results indicate that trusting beliefs have a positive impact on team trust, which in turn, influences team satisfaction. Further, we found that, compared to cross-boundary teams, within-boundary teams exhibited not only higher trusting beliefs and higher satisfaction with the collaboration process but also a stronger relationship between team trust and team satisfaction. These results suggest that trust and group theories need to be interpreted in light of institutional affiliation and contextual variables. An important practical implication is that trust can be fostered in a virtual world environment and collaboration on complex tasks can be carried out effectively in virtual worlds. However, within-boundary virtual teams are preferred over cross-boundary virtual teams if satisfaction with the collaboration process is of the highest priority.     

Intelligent concurrent engineering environment

Though several are the in-roads that have been made towards achieving design-for-manufacturability (DFM) and design-for-assembly (DFA), speaking of some of the crucial issues associated with concurrent engineering, yet very few comprehensive blue-prints exist that speak of a near-complete concurrent engineering environment. This could mainly be attributed to the multifarious versions of how to successfully setup a concurrent engineering environment for today's ever changing engineering scenario. An operational concurrent engineering environment needs to be addressed in its totality or near-totality. This paper is one such venture.     

VSculpt : a distributed virtual sculpting environment for collaborative design

A collaborative virtual sculpting system supports a team of geographically separated designers/engineers connected by networks to participate in designing three-dimensional (3D) virtual engineering tools or sculptures. It encourages international collaboration at a minimal cost. However, in order for the system to be useful, two factors need to be addressed: intuitiveness and real-time interaction. Although a lot of effort has been put into developing virtual sculpting environments, only limited work addresses collaborative virtual sculpting. This is because in order to support real-time collaborative virtual sculpting, many challenging issues need to be addressed. We propose a collaborative virtual sculpting framework, called VSculpt. Through adapting some techniques we developed earlier and integrating them with some techniques developed here, the proposed framework provides a real-time intuitive environment for collaborative design. In particular, it addresses issues on efficient rendering and transmission of deformable objects, intuitive object deformation using the CyberGlove and concurrent object deformation by multiple clients. We demonstrate and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework through a number of experiments.     

Analyzing engineering simulations in a virtual environment

We present new results of ongoing research in developing a virtual environment for car-body engineering applications. Creating VRML scenes lets us use the Internet as a communication platform     

Risk identification and scoring in early-lifecycle concurrent engineering teams

Due to the highly constrained schedules and budgets that NASA missions must contend with, the identification and management of cost, schedule and risks in the earliest stages of the lifecycle is critical. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it is the concurrent engineering teams that first address these items in a systematic manner. Foremost of these concurrent engineering teams is Team X. Started in 1995, Team X has carried out over 1,000 studies, dramatically reducing the time and cost involved, and has been the model for other concurrent engineering teams both within NASA and throughout the larger aerospace community. The ability to do integrated risk identification and assessment was first introduced into Team X in 2001. In this paper, we describe how the Team X risk process is evolving, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches.     

Value sensitive design of a virtual assistant for workload harmonization in teams

Cognition, Technology & Work - Uneven workload distributions in teams can lead to suboptimal team performance. This paper therefore describes the design of a virtual assistant that supports...     

Developing a quantitative intelligent system for implementing concurrent engineering design

This research focuses on the development of a quantitative intelligent system for implementing concurrent engineering design. The paper first discusses the task of concurrent engineering design and the basic requirements for conducting integrated concurrent engineering design. The proposed quantitative intelligent system approach combines qualitative reasoning, based upon design and manufacturing knowledge, and quantitative evaluation and optimization, conducted using design information and manufacturing data generated in the knowledge-based reasoning. The method allows considerations on non-operating principle aspects of a product to be incorporated into the design phase, such as manufacturing, maintenance, service, recycle, etc., with an emphasis on production costs. The proposed method serves as a convenient software tool for gathering information required in the concurrent engineering design process and integrates tasks from different parts of the product development life cycle, particularly function design, manufacturability analysis and production cost estimation. A prototype software system is developed based upon this method using Smalltalk-80. In the prototype system, concurrent engineering design is carried out by: (1) describing and representing design requirements; (2) generating feasible design candidates and evaluating their design functions; (3) representing design geometry; (4) finding the associated production processes and predicting the production costs of each feasible design; and (5) identifying the costeffective design that satisfies given design requirements and requires minimum production costs.     

Problem-centered design in concurrent engineering

This paper introduces the concept of incorporating the human and computerised elements of a design team into a single co-operating system, moving away from the model of a computer system supporting a single user towards being part of a heterarchy of agents. This augments classic CSCW where the computer is a facilitator to that where the computerised elements are active participants.

Within that collection of agents the humans are not only using the computers to solve their own problems but are deployed to satisfy the computers requirements; the whole system being designed to satisfy the customers' requirements. In a design and production environment the primary user is the problem which interfaces to the agents who combine to deliver a solution.

Relevance to industry

Rather than take a computer- or user-centred viewpoint, we argue for a holist cybernetic approach integrating both with the focus on the problem rather than any particular component. Where systems are largely user-driven, such as word processing, then the problem will naturally lean towards a user-centred design. In contrast the solution of large sets of differential equations requires little user involvement and so the focus leans naturally towards the computational aspects. Most systems lie between these extremes. Concurrent engineering is concerned with integrating many aspects of design and manufacture and so requires such a holistic approach to succeed.     

Re-engineering of the design process for concurrent engineering

According to the requirements of concurrent engineering, three interdependency relationships (uncoupled relationship, coupled relationship and decoupled relationship) between design activities are presented in this paper. And the coupled relationship plays an important role in concurrent product design process. To represent the precedence relationships among design activities, a directed graph is used to describe the design process. And the interdependency relationship between activities is illustrated by a Design Structure Matrix which is the transpose of the accessibility matrix of the corresponding graph. Using the DSM, an algorithm of recognizing the coupled activities during the design process is presented. Moreover, an algorithm to figure out the order levels of activities during the design process is proposed. And both algorithms are illustrated with a die design example.     

A virtual studio environment for design integration

In this paper the authors attempt to stress the social dimension of design and the role of explicit support for human-level interaction during design systems integration. A human-centred approach is proposed by taking design integration as the collaborative use of design artefacts, and a virtual studio environment (VSE) framework is presented as an integration vehicle to link the social and technical dimensions. A VSE consists of two subsystems: the VSE base system and the domain resources. While common generic facilities for human–human interaction are embedded within the VSE base system, the domain-specific resources are loosely coupled into VSE via resource agents. A VSE prototype for the domain of building design is described, and a demonstration of the use of the VSE prototype is presented. This is then followed by some discussion on related research and further work. © 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.     

Concept design for quality in virtual environment

The early identification of the optimal concept is a critical task of the design process in order to increase the chances of satisfying customers. The challenging aspect of the approach proposed in this work relies in the quality evaluation of virtual prototypes of new industrial products (i.e. concept designs) by adopting a statistical procedure previously applied to service industries. Following this approach, the optimal concept design is defined at the end of a process consisting of five phases: identification of the quality elements of the concept design, classification of the quality elements, generation and quality evaluation of product concepts and, finally, definition of the optimal concept. Currently, virtual reality (VR) environment offers the opportunity to evaluate the characteristics of different virtual prototypes by involving experts and/or customers, overcoming the need for several physical prototypes. On the other side, the dynamics of simulation and the stereoscopic visualization in VR environment provides a more realistic and impressive interaction with virtual prototypes than in CAD environment.

The proposed methodology is fully exploited through two case studies: the choice of the optimal design for a traditional Neapolitan coffee maker, addressed by the Italian designer Riccardo Dalisi, and for a subassembly of a new minicar.     

A system for design and concurrent engineering under imprecision

This paper proposes an approach to handling imprecision in design and concurrent engineering systems by using interval analysis and constraint networks. By allowing design parameters to be specified with intervals rather than exact points, this approach permits designers to iteratively transform vague conceptual designs into detailed final designs. When a designer changes a variable's interval or assigns a value, the results are propagated through constraints and the resulting feasible interval for all other dependent variables is pruned. The interval constraint network approach described in this paper extends previous work by allowing the representation of and reasoning about complex constraints involving conditions, conjunctions and disjunctions, as well as both symbolic and numeric variables. Many concurrent engineering constraints cannot be modeled without this sort of representational flexibility. A prototype of this approach has been implemented in a system called SPARK-IP. The operation of SPARK-IP is demonstrated through a concurrent engineering design problem involving printed wiring boards.