Team design - analysis, modelling and implementation: An object-oriented, multiple agent constraint management approac

Mechanical design has progressed through various stages in recent times. Moving from slide-rules to calculators, and from calculators to mainframe computers, and from mainframe computers to desktop workstations has permitted a greater flexibility and wider options in design methodologies. Recent research in design has focussed, therefore, on methodologies of design. In practice we encounter teams of specialists working together to develop a complex artifact. The principles of concurrent engineering also motivate us to move away from a sequential and individualistic philosophy of design, to a concurrent and team-oriented perspective. These factors provided the motivation to investigate the computer-based modelling of practical team design, and this is the foundation of the present work.;The overall goal of this research task was to develop a framework for effectively carrying out concurrent team design within the overall domain of mechanical design. It was essential for this framework to be completely machine-independent so that it could be used on multiple computer systems linked together. The framework was to be flexible, permitting modification of the model definition in real-time.;This work studied and analyzed an effective and efficient industrial case study, and then extracted and presented the principles contributing to the success of this case. The concepts arising from this study led directly to the computer modelling and implementation of the team design tool. Team design concepts were surveyed, examining various models of organization. Issues relevant to the modelling of team design were identified and developed. An extensive constraint manager for multiple-team concurrent design problems was researched, developed and implemented. A wide variety of constraints were handled, including equality constraints, inequality constraints, discontinuous constraints, and conditional constraints. The concept of design teams was developed more fully in the course of this work. Various architectures of team interaction were developed, and examined for optimality. The concept of interdependence of teams was researched and developed. The concept of the Interdependence Measure was developed, and utilized to generate design solution sequences. A simple technique was developed to decompose one design team into multiple sub-teams, partially optimized for minimum interdependence. The Interdependence Measure was utilized with a modified clustering algorithm.;The conclusion of this present work was a computer implementation of all the concepts developed in the process of research. This implementation was written in a machine- and device-independent manner, so that it may be used on a wide range of computer systems. With the end result, multiple teams, each using a different computer system may, in principle (and, to a limited extent, in practice; this limitation is merely a reflection of the systems that it has been tested on) carry on concurrent team design together.