Stephen C.-Y. Lu

A Methodology for Collaborative Design Process and Conflict Analysis

Abstract The process of collaborative engineering design is relatively complex, and often results in various conflicts due to technical and social factors. Therefore, to understand the relationships between design process and design conflict is critical to improve the collaborative design productivity. This paper provides a methodology for analyzing collaborative design process and conflict based on a new Socio-Technical design framework. The methodology can identify the interdependencies among design tasks, and manipulate the evolution of various design perspectives to facilitate the management of design conflicts. An initial computer implementation of this methodology is presented and its features are discussed.

Design in the New e-Commerce Era

The computing and communication have become indispensable in every aspect of design and manufacturing. Its impacts on production engineering community have been significant and long lasting. In this paper, we reviewed new e-Commerce models that directly link among production capabilities and with end consumers. We then identified three major forces that will affect the design community, namely, speed of decision, expansion of scope and degree of concurrency. Understanding the implication of these forces would be conducive to leading structural changes in design. The transformations include expanding the scope of design, linking customers and suppliers proactively throughout the entire value chain, and collaborating across boundaries.

A collaborative design process model in the sociotechnical engineering design framework

Collaborative engineering design involves various stakeholders with different perspectives. The design process is relatively complex and difficult to handle. Various conflicts always happen among the design tasks and affect the design team performance. Therefore, to represent the collaborative design process and capture the evolution of design perspectives in a structured way, it is critical to manage the design conflicts and improve the collaborative design productivity. This article provides a generic collaborative design process model based on a sociotechnical design framework. This model has a topological format and adopts process analysis techniques from Petri Nets. By addressing both the technical and social aspects of collaborative design activities, it provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among design tasks and perspectives of different stakeholders. Based on this design process model, a methodology of detecting and handling the design conflicts is developed to support collaborative design coordination.

Collaborative Tagging Applications and Approaches

This article reviews the state of the art in collaborative tagging, its current challenges, and potential methods for resolving these challenges, with a special focus on Web-based, user-generated content applications.

Modeling and managing collaborative processes over the internet

Purpose – Collaborative processes are relatively complex and are therefore difficult to handle. Representing the joint processes and capturing the interactions among stakeholders in a structured way are critical to improve the collaboration productivity. This paper aims to present a generic collaborative process model that improves on current approaches by explicitly representing the perspectives of stakeholders and their evolution traversing a work process.Design/methodology/approach – This approach provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among tasks and stakeholders, and realizes collaboration through process management. A web‐based information system using the model to support collaborative process management is also described.Findings – The research work provides collaboration management systems with the ability to analyze and control the processes through sharing perspectives.Originality/value – The models and methods described in this paper are an important part of a pervasive, resili...

Supporting Negotiations in the Early Stage of Large-Scale Mechanical System Design

The development of large-scale mechanical systems involves interactive negotiations among nontechnical and technical design stakeholders. Usually, two types of negotiations exist: (i) those between the nontechnical stakeholders and technical stakeholders with responsibilities for the overall system, such as chief system design engineers and project managers; and (ii) those within the design engineering groups who are responsible for design tasks at different system hierarchical levels, i.e., system, subsystem, and component. This paper addresses the interactive negotiations among the design engineering groups. A direct synthesis (DS) method was developed to support the negotiations by combining adaptive and interactive modeling system based surrogate modeling with a set-based “zoom-in” approach. A vehicle frontal structural system design example is used to demonstrate how to apply the DS method in industrial practice. The preliminary results show that DS has the potential to support the fast synthesis of robust design alternatives that satisfy performance requirements at the system, subsystem, and component level.

A Model Fusion Approach to Support Negotiations during Complex Engineering System Design

Abstract Computer models have been playing important roles in modern design, particularly at the component and subsystem levels. As competition increases, the challenge of design has shifted from individual components to overall systems. Alternative paradigms, different models and new approaches for using these models are needed to support system designs. This paper presents a “Model Fusion” approach to enable a new paradigm which views engineering design as a collaborative negotiation process. The “Model Fusion” approach fuses (or integrates) separate design and analysis models into a cohesive set of hierarchical empirical models to allow for explicit trade-off between competing modeling objectives. AIMS (Adaptive and Interactive Modeling System), an integrated empirical modeling tool with multiple learning and decomposition algorithms, is used to implement the “Model Fusion” approach. A real world application example of engine combustion chamber design, drawn from the automotive industry, is included to demonstrate the paradigm, approach, application and impact of this research.

An Axiomatic Approach for “Target Cascading” of Parametric Design of Engineering Systems

Abstract Complex engineering system realization involves finding out design specifications that simultaneously achieve performance objectives at different levels. A common practice in industry is to adopt “Target Cascading” to obtain proper settings of the performance objectives, and find out those design specifications, not necessarily optimal, but satisfying all the desirable component-level, subsystem-level and system-level performance objectives. In this paper, an Axiomatic Approach to “Target Cascading” (AATC) is presented to improve the current “Target Cascading” process. AATC uses axioms to guide the decompositions of performance objectives, and an integration of a hybrid meta-modeling tool and direct synthesis method to enhance both robustness and efficiency. The preliminary results of AATCs industrial applications demonstrate its advantage in improving productivity at the early stage parametric design, especially for complex engineering systems.

Active Data-Driven Design Using Dynamic Product Models

Abstract In this paper a new approach to event-driven product design is proposed. It is based on active data of dynamic product models. The dynamic product model contains ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules that trigger execution of tasks or propagate updates to the product data. When certain states of the product design are reached, new design tasks are initiated or a new product model state is automatically reached as the result of a design change propagation. This approach is very suitable for concurrent engineering where the order of design tasks can not be specified in advance. Dynamic product models are stored in an object-oriented database system accessible by all concurrent engineering participants through a software layer that manages the ECA rules. Syntax for the ECA rules and their use in driving concurrent engineering are proposed in this paper

Collective rationality of group decisions in collaborative engineering

Collaborative engineering is a dynamic socio-technical activity where a team of stakeholders works collaboratively to make group decisions based on collective rationality. This paper examines various impossibility conditions and possibility requirements for the existence of collective rationality from both theoretical and practical standpoints. Arrows Impossibility Theorem is examined in light of the special characteristics of collaborative engineering problems. Since from a theoretical standpoint, no social welfare function can satisfy Arrows rationality conditions of group decisions, this paper suggests some practical methods to guide collaborative engineering teams through teamwork and task-work iterations to approach collective rationality systematically when making group decisions.