Environments to support concurrent design teams: a prequel

Design decisions can have unforeseen side effects that cause the need for redesign to propagate across partially completed designs. This risk prevails in linear and ordered models of multidisciplinary design wherein a sequence of specialists each aim to sign off 'completed' portions of a design to their successors. One might imagine that such models should be relatively efficient and easy to manage. Work should flow down-stream from market research to specification to concept design to detail design to manufacture and, finally, to sales. Therefore, since the points of contact between designers are known, each designer should be able to make design decisions whose consequences match the requirements of her immediate successors. The practical flaw in this theory is that one designer's output can conflict with the demands of another designer who is located two or more stages downstream in the ordered sequence of specialists. For example, when a manufacturing designer uncovers mistaken assumptions in the work of a concept designer the need for redesign can propagate back upstream to both the concept designer and to the intervening detail designer. Having established the need for concurrent engineering, the author discusses techniques therein, and in particular the use of knowledge engineering.<
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