| Design is a process where products are defined and created. In the new century, the unceasingly growing complexity of engineering products needs more collaboration than ever. Collaborative design requires multiple people working together to achieve a uniform goal and emphasizes how integrated processes should be carried out systematically. Common data sharing approach and workflow management approach have been developed for engineering designers and project managers to conduct collaborative design. However, in current practice, these approaches are separately applied, i.e., the managers do planning based on workflows without knowing much of engineering details, while designers do engineering work with little knowledge of the overall project. This isolation causes the problems of process efficiency and flexibility, which are highly concerned by many industrial practitioners.; In this research, we developed a work structure based approach for collaborative engineering design. Our goal is to improve product coherency, process efficiency, and process adaptability of collaborative engineering design by integrating management processes with engineering contents and endowing designers with authorities to make certain managerial decisions through coordination. For a specific task, a work structure is a network of engineering work items connected by engineering dependencies, which serves as a skeleton to generate feasible processes. From these processes, the one which best fits the current situation is dynamically determined through the coordination between the manager and designers based on their various criteria. In order to capture engineering dependencies and link workflow with engineering details, an adaptive process model has been developed to model engineering work, work structure, and processes. Based on this model, a set of mechanisms and algorithms have been developed for intelligent agents to provide knowledge and coordination support for designers. As a result of this research, a comprehensive framework has been developed to support large-scale product development projects. Experiments of using this framework showed that by following this approach, engineering design processes can dynamically adapt to both requirement and technology changes, and the process efficiency can be significantly improved. |
