A process-oriented multi-agent system development approach to support the cooperation-activities of concurrent new product development

In the recent decade, concurrent new product development (CNPD) has been recognized as an effective approach for eliminating the long and costly product development cycle. CNPD needs multi-disciplinary workgroups to communicate and cooperate in a computer network environment, particularly a multi-agent system (MAS) environment. Recently, several MAS development approaches for CNPD cooperation have been proposed. These approaches constitute on a goal basis and this will confine the application of developed MAS to the pre-defined goals. However, in a complete CNPD process, different cooperation requirements take place at different stages and need different workgroups to be involved. Consequently, the goal-driven MAS development approaches can only provide a partial solution to the overall cooperation requirements of a CNPD process.This research has proposed a process-oriented approach to develop MAS for all CNPD cooperation requirements. This approach is acting on two phases: the process-oriented cooperation requirements analysis phase and the MAS specification design phase. The process-oriented cooperation requirements analysis phase first defines the desired CNPD process and cooperation workflow based on the company-specific organizational structure and practice. Next, the MAS specification design phase derives the MAS specification, including the agent classes, their conversations and system configuration, from the defined CNPD process and cooperation workflow. Besides, an empirical case is used to explain the proposed approach and to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach on the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE).     

A digital twin-based multidisciplinary collaborative design approach for complex engineering product development

With the ever-increasing demand for personalized product functions, product structure becomes more and more complex. To design a complex engineering product, it involves mechanical, electrical, automation and other relevant fields, which requires a closer multidisciplinary collaborative design (MCD) and integration. However, the traditional design method lacks multidisciplinary coordination, which leads to interaction barriers between design stages and disconnection between product design and prototype manufacturing. To bridge the gap, a novel digital twin-enabled MCD approach is proposed. Firstly, the paper explores how to converge the MCD into the digital design process of complex engineering products in a cyber-physical system manner. The multidisciplinary collaborative design is divided into three parts: multidisciplinary knowledge collaboration, multidisciplinary collaborative modeling and multidisciplinary collaborative simulation, and the realization methods are proposed for each part. To be able to describe the complex product in a virtual environment, a systematic MCD framework based on the digital twin is further constructed. Integrate multidisciplinary collaboration into three stages: conceptual design, detailed design and virtual verification. The ability to verify and revise problems arising from multidisciplinary fusions in real-time minimizes the number of iterations and costs in the design process. Meanwhile, it provides a reference value for complex product design. Finally, a design case of an automatic cutting machine is conducted to reveal the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Cognitive biases and decision support systems development: a design science approach

Abstract.  This paper presents design science research that aims to improve decision support systems (DSS) development in organizations. Evolutionary development has been central to DSS theory and practice for decades, but a significant problem for DSS analysts remains how to conceptualize the improvement of a decision task during evolutionary DSS development. The objective of a DSS project is to improve the decision process and outcome for a manager making an important decision. The DSS analyst needs to have a clear idea of the nature of the target decision task and a clear strategy of how to support the decision process. Existing psychological research was examined for help with the conceptualization problem, and the theory of cognitive bias is proposed as a candidate for this assistance. A taxonomy of 37 cognitive biases that codifies a complex area of psychological research is developed. The core of the project involves the construction of a design artefact – an evolutionary DSS development methodology that uses cognitive bias theory as a focusing construct, especially in its analysis cycles. The methodology is the major contribution of the project. The feasibility and effectiveness of the development methodology are evaluated in a participatory case study of a strategic DSS project where a managing director is supported in a decision about whether to close a division of a company.     

An optimum design selection approach for product customization development

Consumer preferences and information on product choice behavior can be of significant value in the development processes of innovative products. In this paper, product customization evaluation and selection model is introduced to support imprecision inherent of qualitative inputs from customers and designers in the decision making process. Focusing on customer utility generation, an optimum design selection approach based on fuzzy set decision-making is proposed, where design attributes priority is identified from customer preferences using an analytical hierarchy process. A multi-attribute analysis diagram is developed to visualize the preference of each attribute from the expert’s group decision. Conjoint analysis is used in the product customization to focus on customer utility generation in terms of multiple criteria. The use of the decision-making method is illustrated with a case example that highlights the utility of the proposed method.     

A vision-oriented approach for innovative product design

Nowadays, business globalization, complex consumer requirements, and high technology development have led to vigorous business competition and market uncertainty. In new product design, it is increasingly important to put more emphasis on innovative concerns than quality and speed of production. Providing unique, innovative and value-added products becomes a crucial strategy for success. This study aims to develop a new product design process that concentrates on radical innovations. Visioning thinking, TRIZ, Image Scale, and Morphological Analysis are integrated for developing designs with a balance of rational/logical analyses and intuitive/creative thinking. The proposed process fulfills the need for radical innovation through enriching heuristic thinking. It is a useful methodology that adds value to products in terms of technological functions, form perceptions, and holistic usability. A proposal of therapy bike design for cerebral palsy children is demonstrated using the new process. Through case demonstration, designers could enhance products with human-centered values while coping with market uncertainty effectively. The applicability of the vision-oriented approach for innovative product design is verified.     

Software development: knowledge-intensive work organizations

. We report the findings from three studies of software development projects using a series of questions framed to provide a more detailed understanding than usually pertains of the management and organization, outcomes and derivations of work organization. We discuss some practical and theoretical implications of this work; in particular we conclude that these are knowledge intensive work organizations, that current theory is illequipped to address these practices, and that their analysis and understanding requires both organizational and cognitive explanations.     

Platform-based design and software design methodology for embeddedsystems

Embedded products have become so complex and must be developed so quickly that current design methodologies are no longer adequate. The authors' vision for the future of embedded-system design involves two essential components: a rigorous methodology for embedded software development and platform-based design     

Telecommunications service development: A design methodology and its intelligent support

This paper describes a development life cycle for telecommunications services, emphasizing requirements capture, formal specification and validation. The service is developed along the three dimensions of the methodology: refinement, completeness and formality, aiming for a complete, consistent and formally specified service definition. The described methodology can be integrated into currently existing development life cycles which employ formal methods for service creation. Active support for the proposed life cycle is provided by a novel expert system called Requirements Assistant for Telecommunications Services (RATS), currently under development. It actively helps during requirements acquisition and early analysis, and encourages specification reuse with the help of a semi-automated negotiation process. The RATS tool advises the service developer during all stages of the service development, and on different levels of abstraction, and provides requirements management facilities, like traceability, impact analysis and document generation. Some of the features are illustrated using examples from the Universal Personal Telecommunication (UPT) service.     

A decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering

Compared with the traditional sequential design method, concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrate concurrent design of products and their related processes. One of the key factors to successfully implement concurrent engineering is information technology. In order to design a product and its manufacturing process simultaneously, information on product features, manufacturing requirements, and customer demands must be processed while the design is concurrently going on. There is an increased understanding of the importance of the correct decisions being made at the conceptual design and development stages that involve many complex evaluation and decision-making tasks. In order to promote the efficiency in concurrent product development, appropriate evaluation and decision tools need to be provided. In this paper, the characteristics of fuzzy, multi-stage evaluation and decision making in concurrent product development process are analyzed and a decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering is presented. An example is given to illustrate the application of the system.     

User interface design for decision support systems: A self-adaptive approach

This paper presents a self-adaptive approach to user interface design. The primary philosophy of this design is that the user interface must be aware of the changes in its user's behavior and then adapt to it. Three different default policies are proposed to control the adaptation of a user interface: fixed default, dynamic default, and no default. Performance of these policies are compared for various patterns of usage. Mechanisms that determine the optimal default value to reduce the unnecessary effort are also discussed.     

A usage coverage-based approach for assessing product family design

Computation techniques have provided designers with deeper understanding of the market niches that were neglected before. Usage contextual information has been studied in marketing research since the last century; however, little research in design engineering focuses on it. Therefore, in this paper, we analyzed the relations between usage context information and the design of products. A usage coverage model is established to integrate users and their expected usage scenarios into product family assessment. We map the user’s individual capacity together with a given product into the usage context space. The overlapping between the required usage and feasible usage can be measured. Based on this mechanism, several usage coverage indices are proposed to assess the compliance of a given product family to the expected set of usage scenarios to be covered. The original method is demonstrated on a scale-based product family of jigsaws in a redesign context. Constraint programming technique is applied to solve the physics-based causal loops that determine usage performances in a set-based design approach. Designers can rely on the results to eliminate redundant units in the family or modify the configuration of each product. The contribution of the paper is to provide an inter-disciplinary point of view to assessing the composition and configuration of a product family design.     

An ontology-based support for product conceptual design

The research presented in this paper is a follow-up of our prior work involving the development of a graphical modeling tool to support designers at the conceptual design stage. To close the loop for supporting designers in generating design concepts flexibly, fast, and easily, an ontology-based approach for knowledge management that works along with the graphical modeling tool is discussed. Ontology and databases for the tool are developed to promote the systematic capture of design knowledge and efficient reuse of the design knowledge selection. In order to locate the proper information and query the data from the databases, the relationship between the ontology and databases, the data analysis process, ontology enrichment, and the ontology-based query engine are built to offer users multiple design results according to users’ requirements. A tire design example is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach. The ontology-based method described in this paper can help retrieve and save the complex relations, support the reasoning, integrate heterogeneous data resources and offer users more accurate, proper and comprehensive data.     

An integrated component design approach to the development of a design information system for customer-oriented product design

In product design, the designer must draw upon many different types of information including both product-user requirements and design developments in related fields. As each designer has his/her own subjective opinion, an appropriate link between the user requirements and design features must be carefully developed to generate the most suitable design recommendation.The objective of this research is to develop a component design approach for the generation and evaluation of feasible design alternatives to help designers make the most effective design decisions. The development of the approach is based on the concept of component design and interaction links between user requirements and design output parameter values so that the design alternatives can be generated. A confidence interval for order statistics is then used to determine if enough unique feasible design alternatives have been generated. The research is presented in conjunction with a ballpoint pen design to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of this approach.The results should provide designers with a useful method for the development of a design information system that will efficiently generate and evaluate a set of feasible design alternatives in product design process.     

Structured modeling group support systems: a product design theory

Structured modeling is critical to the design, development, and implementation of many systems including computer software, business processes, and data networks. Since the creation of structured models relies on the knowledge of many organizational stakeholders, groups often accomplish this task. Group support systems (GSS) focus on the support of group processes and would appear to be useful for structured modeling; however, GSS usually only provide textual or decision related output rather than the structured models needed for many design processes. This paper proposes a class of systems, structured modeling GSS (smGSS), which adds support for the development of structured models to standard GSS. Since past research has shown that research results may be difficult to compare across studies when the system under investigation is not well defined, this paper develops a product design theory that defines the required characteristics of and testable design propositions for an smGSS as derived from existing theory and empirical investigations.     

A review of digital twin in product design and development

In the era of digitalization, there are many emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Twin (DT), Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which are quickly developped and used in product design and development. Among those technologies, DT is one promising technology which has been widely used in different industries, especially manufacturing, to monitor the performance, optimize the progresses, simulate the results and predict the potential errors. DT also plays various roles within the whole product lifecycle from design, manufacturing, delivery, use and end-of-life. With the growing demands of individualized products and implementation of Industry 4.0, DT can provide an effective solution for future product design, development and innovation. This paper aims to figure out the current states of DT research focusing on product design and development through summarizing typical industrial cases. Challenges and potential applications of DT in product design and development are also discussed to inspire future studies.     

A computerized team approach for concurrent product and process design optimization

Concurrent product and process design (CPPD) can be handled by developing a computerized team approach. In the team approach, CPPD at the top-level abstraction is treated as a two-objective optimization problem with a view to two teams: design and manufacture. The design team aims to optimize the overall product functionality (or performance) and the manufacture team to minimize the total manufacturing cost. Satisfaction metrics are used to characterize the degree of how each team prefers a design in seeking the most favorite that best fulfills the goal of a team. Using min and geometric mean operators as a baseline, the satisfaction levels of two teams can be aggregated with respect to strategic team paradigms derived from game theory. With satisfaction metrics, three dual-team based CPPD models are developed, along with the computational algorithms, in an attempt to reveal team activities in the context of design. The procedures to simulate and implement various team design models are demonstrated through a design example.