Large-scale engineering projects typically involve many different types of professionals who must interact and communicate with one another. This interaction produces conflicts that need to be resolved. A framework is presented in which the rationale used in a collaborative design environment for designing an artifact is also used for conflict mitigation. The framework contains mechanisms for checking interactions and prompting hypotheses about the reasons for the interactions. These hypotheses, once verified by the designers, improve conflict resolution by assisting them in coordinating and negotiating conflicts. This, in turn, enhances communication during the design process and consequently increases productivity in the engineering industry.

Current design practices mandate that engineering designs be evaluated based on multiple attributes, e.g., cost, power, and area. For multiattribute design problems, generation and evaluation of the Pareto optimal set guarantees the optimal design will be found, but is not practical for a large class of problems. Iterative techniques can be applied to most problems, but sacrifice optimality. In this paper, we introduce a new technique that extends the set of design problems that can be solved optimally. By first constructing an imprecise value function, the number of nondominated alternatives that must be generated is reduced. We describe an implementation based on combinatorial optimization and constraint satisfaction which achieves additional performance gains by decomposing the value function to identify dominated design-variable assignments. Test results indicate that our approach extends the set of problems that can be solved optimally.

Research efforts to implement a Bayesian belief-network-based expert system to solve a real-world diagnostic problem – the diagnosis of integrated circuit (IC) testing machines – are described. The development of several models of the IC tester diagnostic problem in belief networks also is described, the implementation of one of these models using symbolic probabilistic inference (SPI) is outlined, and the difficulties and advantages encountered are discussed. It was observed that modeling with interdependencies in belief networks simplifies the knowledge engineering task for the IC tester diagnosis problem, by avoiding procedural knowledge and focusing on the diagnostic component’s interdependencies. Several general model frameworks evolved through knowledge engineering to capture diagnostic expertise that facilitated expanding and modifying the networks. However, model implementation was restricted to a small portion of the modeling, that of contact resistance failures, which were due to time limitations and inefficiencies in the prototype inference software we used. Further research is recommended to refine existing methods, in order to speed evaluation of the models created in this research. With this accomplished, a more complete diagnosis can be achieved.

The design of even the simplest product requires thousands of decisions. Yet few of these decisions are supported with methods on paper or on computers. Is this because engineering design decisions do not need support or is it because techniques have yet to be developed that are usable on a wide basis? In considering this question a wide range of decision problem characteristics need to be addressed. In engineering design some decisions are made by individuals, others by teams – some are about the product and others about the processes that support the product – some are based on complete, consistent, quantitative data and others on sparse, conflicting, qualitative discussions. To address the reasons why so little support is used and the characteristics of potentially useful decision support tools, a taxonomy of decision characteristics is proposed. This taxonomy is used to classify current techniques and to define the requirements for an ideal engineering design decision support system.

Integrating multiple engineering perspectives is critical to designing ever more complex products, but this introduces great potential for miscommunication leading to design conflicts. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project is defining agent infrastructure technology that supports dynamic, knowledge-based communication among heterogeneous engineering tools, collaboration systems, and conflict management systems. Building on technologies for defining a shared formal vocabulary and protocols for exchanging information, SHADE is developing facilitators that assist in locating and disseminating information. The result is a flexible infrastructure that helps existing engineering tools work together more effectively, and that supports a variety of new conflict management approaches. This article outlines the facilitation and application agents created by SHADE, and provides an in-depth example of their application to an engineering task.

A precise market model for a well-defined class of distributed configuration design problems is presented. Given a design problem, the model defines a computational economy to allocate basic resources to agents participating in the design. The result of running these “design economies” constitutes the market solution to the original problem. After defining the configuration design framework, the mapping to computational economies and the results to date are described. For some simple examples, the system can produce good designs relatively quickly. However, analysis shows that the design economies are not guaranteed to find optimal designs, and some of the major pitfalls are identified and discussed. Despite known shortcomings and limited explorations thus far, the market model offers a useful conceptual viewpoint for analyzing distributed design problems.

This paper extends previously developed generalized set propagation operations to work over relationships among an arbitrary number of variables, thereby expanding the domain of engineering design problems the theory can address. It then narrows its scope to a class of functions and sets useful to designers solving engineering problems: monotonic algebraic functions and closed intervals of real numbers, proving formulas for computing the operations under these conditions. The work is aimed at the automated optimal design of electro-mechanical systems from catalogs of parts; an electronic example illustrates.

Design Expert Systems can be built using many small, cooperating, limited function expert systems called Single Function Agents (SiFAs). Using this approach we will be able to investigate and discover primitive problem-solving and interaction patterns, specific for multiagent design systems, and should gain a deeper understanding of the types of knowledge involved. This paper presents some categories of conflicts that have been studied using the SiFA approach, and makes a brief presentation of the SINE implementation of SiFAs.

Much of preliminary engineering design is a constraint-driven non-monotonic exploration process. Initial decisions are made when information is incomplete and many goals are contradictory. Such conditions are present regardless of whether one or several designers contribute to designs. This paper presents an approach for supporting decisions in situations of incomplete and conflicting knowledge. In particular, we use assumptions and conflict management to achieve efficient search in contexts where little reliable information exists. A knowledge representation, containing a semantic differentiation between two types of assumptions, is used within a computational model based on the dynamic constraint satisfaction paradigm. Conflict management strategies consist of three generic mechanisms adapted to the type of constraints involved. These strategies may be refined through consideration of variable importance, context, and design inertia.

The Explorer parametric design assistant, an interactive tool that provides intelligent support for searching concurrent-engineering trade-spaces under multiple, conflicting objectives, is described. The system provides a convenient means for specifying multiple, cross-disciplinary constraints in terms of tables, formulas, and logical sentences. Based on these data, the system performs interactive constraint checking, computes feasible designs, and provides graphical analysis facilities, allowing users to compare designs based on multiple criteria. As a first application, Explorer has been used as a printed circuit board (PCB) construction design assistant. In initial tests, Explorer has helped users to find design configurations not previously considered that yield comparable performance and cost while offering better manufacturability and reliability. The capabilities and use of the Explorer system are described in detail, the underlying technologies are outlined, and an evaluation of the prototype system is presented.

Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and the related processes of manufacturing and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from concept through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements. To achieve successful concurrent-engineering design, one needs an integrated framework, a well-organized design team, and adequate design tools. The research on concurrent engineering to date has focused on developing communication infrastructure, design tools, and product data representations. Little attention has been paid to developing tools to address the organizational issues involved in concurrent engineering. The authors’ research on the Virtual Design Team (VDT) attempts to develop a computerized analysis tool to sup-port the systematic design of organization structures for concurrent engineering projects. VDT is a computer simulation system. It takes descriptions of design tasks, actors (i.e., designers and managers), and organization structure as input, and produces predicted historical records of the actors’ design and coordination behavior, project du-ration, cost, and design process quality as output. VDT has been applied to model more than ten realistic engineering projects, and the results are qualitatively consistent with the predictions from theory and project managers. The VDT framework for modeling concurrent-engineering teams is described, and examples of VDT applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Virtual Design Team approach to modeling the organizational behavior of concurrent design teams.

Conflicts are likely to arise among participants in a collaborative design process as the inevitable outgrowth of the differing perspectives and viewpoints involved. The opportunities for conflict are magnified if many perspectives are brought to bear on a common artifact early in the design process, as in concurrent engineering or integrated engineering. Design advice tools can assist in the process of resolving these conflicts by making critiques and suggestions conveniently available to design participants, and by offering a fair means of evaluating and comparing suggested alternatives for compromise solution. In previous work we introduced a protocol based on notions of economic utility by which design advice systems can recognize conflict and mediate negotiation fairly. This protocol allowed design teams to express the desire to maximize or minimize the values of design parameters over totally ordered bounded domains of values, such as real numeric intervals. In this paper we extend this approach by allowing expressed preferences of design teams to be qualitative as well as quantitative, by allowing teams to express interest in parameters before they actually come into existence, and by relaxing many other of the earlier restrictions on the ways teams may express their preferences.