A New Process Modeling Method for Product Collaborative Design

Abstract

The product collaborative design process had such characters: multidisciplinary, hierarchy, concurrent, phase, iteration, cooperativity, restriction and conflict- ineluctability. The present product design process modeling methods have their own characters, however, most of them suppose design to be a simple technical decision-making activity. They fail to describe the information completely, support the management, make quantitative analysis for the process performance and reflect the properties mentioned above comprehensively. Therefore, the cooperating correlative map base on activity (CCM_A) process modeling method, aiming at the properties in product collaborative design process and basing on the activity theory and combining the MCM modeling method was proposed in this paper. There are such elements like activity unit, process logic and process bound in the proposed method. The `activity unit' defined in CCM_A could reflect the properties of the collaborative design process completely. It emphasized the restriction, cooperativity of the design activity, and can describe the process information completely. The CCM_A method classified the activity cells carefully to describe all kinds of the activities in design process correctly. The process bound defined in CCM_A is the ` flow', and the ` flow' was classified into token -flow, information- flow and material- flow to convenient the management of the flow. Finally, the method of analyzing process performance (process performance including the fulfill possibility, process conflicts detect, resources conflicts detect, cost analysis and so on) is developed based on the CCM_A process model. It could reflect the collaborative design process properties completely and supports the performance analysis of the process using the CCM_A process modeling method. Therefore the method is a useful new process modeling method for the product collaborative design.