Version Management in a CAD Paradigm

Author(s):  
Karthik Krishnamurthy ◽  
Kincho H. Law

Abstract This paper describes the change management capabilities of a data management model to support engineering design. Specifically, it addresses the problem of detecting changes made to a design during a CAD session and efficiently maintains an evolving description of a primitive entity through the design process. We propose a hierarchical versioning model to support the independent evolution of alternative deigns for a primitive entity and provide operators to store and manage changes among versions in a particular derivation hierarchy. In addition, we present a scheme to represent the version model in a CAD paradigm. The version model presented in this paper is a component of a larger data management model of versions, assemblies, configurations to address the change management needs of collaborative design.

Author(s):  
Li Zhao ◽  
Yan Jin

Abstract Collaborative engineering involves multiple engineers and managers working together to develop engineering products. As the engineering problems become more and more complicated, new technologies are required to achieve better effectiveness and efficiency. While process models management and technologies have been developed to support engineering design, most of them apply only to routine design tasks and do not explicitly deal with the change of processes during execution. Our research proposes a process-driven framework to support collaborative engineering. The framework is composed of a process model that captures both high level and low level activity dependencies, an agent network that monitors process execution and facilitates coordination among engineers, and a Petri-net based modeling tool to represent and analyze process features and predict the performance of engineering processes. In this paper, we first describe a simple collaborative design problem and our proposed ActivePROCESS collaborative engineering framework. After that we present our Petri-net based analytical model of collaborative design process and discuss the model along with a case example.


Author(s):  
Carolynn J. Walthall ◽  
Srikanth Devanathan ◽  
Lorraine Kisselburgh ◽  
Karthik Ramani ◽  
E. Daniel Hirleman ◽  
...  

Wikis, freely editable collections of web pages, are showing potential for a flexible documentation and communication tool for collaborative design tasks. They also provide a medium that can be further transformed by properly understanding both the need for flexibility as well as support for design thinking early in the design process. The purpose of this work is to analyze the different dimensions of the wiki from a communication perspective as applicable to design. With a focus on communication in design, we will explore the advantages and disadvantages of using wikis in student engineering design teams. Our ultimate goal is to better support the design process while exploiting the potential for increasing the shared understanding among teams using a wiki. By introducing a wiki in a globally distributed product development course, students gain hands-on experience in using wikis as a design tool. Feedback from students will be collected through questionnaires and used to improve and transform the wiki as a support tool for communication during early design collaboration.


2008 ◽  
Vol 130 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashwin Gurnani ◽  
Kemper Lewis

One perspective of a design process in the engineering design community is that it is largely a process marked and defined by a series of decisions. The fundamental assumption in most developed design decision support methodologies is that decision makers make rational choices; that is, choices that maximize the payoff for the predicted outcome. Decisions that do not maximize the predicted payoff are termed as mistakes or irrational choices and discarded. However, research in behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive science has studied the human mind and suggested the notion of “bounded rationality” to explain decision errors. Bounded rationality refers to the intrinsic inability of human beings to accurately choose “rational” options prescribed by decision models such as expected utility. This paper extends the notion of bounded rationality within engineering design. Specifically, this paper studies the design of complex systems that require interaction among several different subsystems contributing to the overall product design. For convergent decentralized design problems, rational designers converge to equilibrium solutions that lie at the intersection of their individual rational reaction sets. These equilibrium solutions are usually not Pareto optimal and due to the dynamics of the designers’ interaction in collaborative design, it is rarely possible for them to converge to Pareto optimal solutions. However, when models for bounded rationality are introduced into individual designer behavior, it is seen that the converged solutions can improve the resulting solution. Bounded rational decisions within decentralized design are modeled, and the effects of propagating such decisions within a design process are studied.


Author(s):  
Pranav Milind Khanolkar ◽  
Mohammed Gad ◽  
Jessica Liao ◽  
Ada Hurst ◽  
Alison Olechowski

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have shed light on the potential uses and applications of AI tools in engineering design. However, the aspiration of a fully automated engineering design process still seems out of reach of AI’s current capabilities, and therefore, the need for human expertise and cognitive skills persists.  Nonetheless, a collaborative design process that emphasizes and uses the strengths of both AI and human engineers is an appealing direction for AI in design. Touncover the current applications of AI, the authors review literature pertaining to AI applications in design research and engineering practice. This highlights the importance of integrating AI education into engineering design curricula in post-secondary institutions. Next, a pilot studyassessment of undergraduate mechanical engineering course descriptions at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto reveals that only one out of a total of 153 courses provides both AI and design-related knowledge together in a course. This result identifies possible gaps in Canadian engineering curricula and potential deficiencies in the skills of graduating Canadianengineers.


Author(s):  
Dennis Bahler ◽  
Catherine Dupont ◽  
James Bowen

AbstractConflicts 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.


Author(s):  
STEPHEN C.-Y. LU ◽  
JIAN CAI

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.


Author(s):  
Adam Dachowicz ◽  
Siva Chaitanya Chaduvula ◽  
Jitesh H. Panchal ◽  
Mikhail Atallah

The globalization of collaboration in engineering design has raised several new concerns regarding information sharing. In particular, data shared during collaboration has the potential to leak private information through inferences that may be made by another collaborator. Enterprises that must keep certain information confidential, fearing loss of intellectual property, may turn down potential collaborations that would otherwise be mutually beneficial. Thus, there is need for a method to study this tradeoff between confidentiality and value in engineering collaboration. In this paper, a framework for analyzing this tradeoff is proposed, along with an illustrative example of a possible implementation and its effects on the collaborative design process. This framework estimates and quantifies the confidentiality loss and value gain associated with information revelation during design iterations. We believe that such analysis would aid designers in making better decisions about sharing information with their collaborators. Studying this tradeoff may incentivize designers to engage in more frequent, and more secure, collaboration.


Author(s):  
Camilo POTOCNJAK-OXMAN

Stir was a crowd-voted grants platform aimed at supporting creative youth in the early stages of an entrepreneurial journey. Developed through an in-depth, collaborative design process, between 2015 and 2018 it received close to two hundred projects and distributed over fifty grants to emerging creatives and became one of the most impactful programs aimed at increasing entrepreneurial activity in Canberra, Australia. The following case study will provide an overview of the methodology and process used by the design team in conceiving and developing this platform, highlighting how the community’s interests and competencies were embedded in the project itself. The case provides insights for people leading collaborative design processes, with specific emphasis on some of the characteristics on programs targeting creative youth


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