Within the engineering design community there is support for further
research into the development of improved approaches to design
management. Such research has lead to coordination being identified as
an important and pervasive characteristic of many existing approaches
(e.g., concurrent engineering and work-flow management). In this
article, operational design coordination is proposed as the basis for
an improved approach. This article also presents a novel integrated
approach that incorporates the key elements of operational design
coordination: coherence, communication, task management, resource
management, schedule management, and real-time support. Through
unifying these key elements, this approach provides an integrated means
of managing design in a controlled and harmonious fashion. The approach
also provides knowledge of the constituent techniques involved in
operational design coordination, the interrelationships and dynamic
interactions between them, and the knowledge used and maintained within
and between them. The approach has been realized within an
agent-oriented system called the Design Coordination System, which
provides a systematic means of simultaneously coordinating operational
management tasks and technical design tasks. To evaluate the approach,
the system has been applied to an industrial case study involving the
computational process of turbine blade design. This application has
been shown to enable the structured undertaking of interrelated tasks
by allocating and using resources of varying performance efficiency in
an optimized fashion in accordance with dynamically derived schedules
in a coherent, appropriate, and timely manner. This is achieved by
managing tasks, their dependencies, and the information required to
undertake them. In addition, the approach enables and sustains the
continuous optimized use of resources by monitoring, forecasting, and
disseminating resource performance efficiency. The approach facilitates
dynamic scheduling and the subsequent enactment of the resulting
schedules. Decision making for rescheduling is also incorporated within
the approach such that it is only performed as and when appropriate. If
rescheduling is performed, it is done so in parallel with task
enactment such that resources continue to be utilized in an optimized
manner.
Integrating “Hard” and “Soft” Infrastructural Resilience Assessment for Water Distribution Systems
