Collaborative Conceptual Design Research Articles

Multi-agent collaborative conceptual design method for robotic manufacturing systems in small- and mid-sized enterprises

Robotic manufacturing systems are essential in the post-pandemic world owing to their high level of flexibility and automation during a labor crisis. However, designing a suitable robotic manufacturing system for small- and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) is challenging, considering both their financial burdens and the current supply chain disruptions of component suppliers. To address these challenges, this study proposes a distributed multi-agent collaborative conceptual design method involving designers and suppliers to assist SMEs in implementing robotic manufacturing systems. First, we propose a common data model that enables knowledge interaction between different agents during collaborative conceptual design. Subsequently, based on the proposed data model, the agent-based collaborative conceptual design process is developed, which enables different agents to communicate, interact, and negotiate with each other according to their experiences and knowledge. Third, an integrative algorithm based on 2-additive fuzzy measures, Choquet integral, and stochastic multi-criteria acceptability analysis is implemented to support the multi-agent decision-making process to robustly select architecture alternatives. As a case study, a real industrial design project of a robotic manufacturing system required by our industrial partner, is adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Multi-Agent Collaborative Conceptual Design Method for Robotic Manufacturing Systems in SMEs

Multi-Agent Collaborative Conceptual Design Method for Robotic Manufacturing Systems in SMEs

A multi-agent-based approach for conceptual design synthesis of multi-disciplinary systems

It is encouraged that designers should explore in wide multi-disciplinary solution spaces for finding novel and promising principle solutions to desired functions during conceptual design. However, due to lack of sufficient multi-disciplinary knowledge, it is often difficult for human designers to explore in wide multi-disciplinary solution spaces. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-agent-based approach for assisting designers in achieving multi-disciplinary conceptual design synthesis. The roles of different kinds of designing agents are identified, and the collaborative mechanisms among these agents are also elaborated. The conceptual design test case of a solar toy demonstrates that the proposed multi-agent-based design synthesis approach, compared with our previous approach, can achieve higher efficiency and better robustness through collaborative conceptual design synthesis.

Research on collaborative conceptual design based on distributed knowledge resource

Conceptual design is an early stage of the whole product development process, which involves the generation of solutions to satisfy the design requirements. It is a crucial issue on how to find proper principle solutions from enormous, isomeric, and even distributed knowledge resources repositories and then ally with these correlative distributed knowledge resources providers to collaborative conceptual design. Design is a task-solving process using corresponding resource, so it does not always have an agency in product design. This paper proposes a model of collaborative conceptual design based on distributed knowledge resources, which is centered on design tasks and based on dynamic knowledge alliance without agency. After a model of knowledge resource unit and a model of Web services based on knowledge resource are proposed, a virtual quantitative and qualitative knowledge resource representation based on knowledge grid is then put forward. The mixed knowledge resource repository is also proposed to support collaborative conceptual design. The strategies of knowledge register, publish, storage, reorganization, orientation, and problem solving based on mixed knowledge resource repository are then discussed in detail. The data exchange mode of principle solutions is then described. The selection strategy of dynamic knowledge alliance members is established. The framework of distributed knowledge resource is also put forward to support collaborative conceptual design. The process of collaborative conceptual design based on distributed knowledge resource is then proposed. The conceptual design of new devices for decreasing resistance of amphibious vehicles is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously helpful to produce valuable principle solutions with distributed knowledge for product innovation.

Impacts of VR 3D sketching on novice designers’ spatial cognition in collaborative conceptual architectural design

Conventional Computer Aided Design tools lack intuitivity for being used in conceptual architectural design process. This paper identifies the impact of using a haptic based VR 3D sketching interface for integrating novice designers’ cognitions and actions to improve design creativity. This study employs protocol analysis for comparing the collective cognitive and collaborative design protocols of three pairs of novice architectural designers in both 3D and manual sketching sessions. Results show that the simple and tangible haptic based design interface improved designers’ cognitive and collaborative activities. These improvements also increased their engagement with ‘problem-space’ and ’solution-space’ that led towards more artefact maturity. Research findings from this study can help the development of cutting-edge haptic-based collaborative virtual environments in architectural education and associated professions.

A User-Centered Multi-Agent Framework for Extensible Modular Design

To target both present users and future potential customers, which are often ignored by most researches, very early in the collaborative conceptual design stage, a multi-agent framework is presented to integrate the distributed design activities. By introducing a cost-effective and timely modular design system and modeling its ‘users’, a typical intelligent and autonomous agent is constructed and the principle of cooperation among multiple agents is discussed for maximizing today’s and tomorrow’s customer requirements. The proposed system is successfully demonstrated on the hydraulic press products design.

Special issue on: Collaborative and Multi-disciplinary Product Design

Collaborative and multi-disciplinary design can be defined as a process to coherently exploit the synergy of mutually interacting disciplinary expertise to optimize complex and large-scale product development. Due to the product complexity and the disciplinary backgrounds of engineers, the organization and management of the process remains as a challenge. Some difficulties include: there is no effective collaborative and multidiscipline development platform; efficient ways for knowledge and information exchange across domains do not exist; collaborative engineering needs sophisticated and optimized strategies to solve conflicts and to achieve better system performance; more research is required to provide designers with better understanding and more efficient approaches on the integration of conceptual design and detailed design to achieve the overall optimization, etc. To find effective solutions, many organizations, including academic, researchoriented, governmental, industrial and commercial ones, have recently started a number of research initiatives. In this special issue, seven papers are included to update the latest progress in this significant research area. The majority of the papers are the extended and peer-reviewed versions of those selected from the 2008 International Conference of Advances on Product Development and Reliability (PDR’2008), Chengdu, China, in which more than 100 papers were presented. The topics covered by this special issue are: unified product models to support lifecycle knowledge sharing, interoperability in collaborative engineering across design, manufacturing, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life stages, multi-disciplinary optimization models to support collaborative conceptual design, systematic and collaborative methodologies to generate innovative design from product requirements, and the development of software platforms and tools to support collaborative design processes and information retrieval. The first paper by Ding et al. presents a unified and XML-based product model to support lifecycle information and knowledge exchange. The model offers the potential to enable designers to revisit and retrieve the information throughout the lifecycle of machine design and build processes dynamically. An industrial case study for cleaning tank design has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the operation of the model. The second paper by Ma investigates the interoperability in collaborative engineering across design, manufacturing, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life stages with an expanded generic feature paradigm. A unified and consistent interoperable semantic scheme has been proposed to support an open and flexible knowledge realization system. The scheme and system have been applied to the oil production industry, and three design cases for grating layout, oil tank scaffolding and the piping system during an oil rig design process have been discussed. The third paper by Chu et al. addresses the uncertainty issue in collaborative and multi-disciplinary conceptual design. Based on the summary of uncertainties in conceptual design, a systematic tool based on the rough set theory and advanced kriging model has been developed to represent the approximate relationships between major design parameters. With the approximate relationships, designers can adjust design parameters and evaluate the impact of the changes to the overall performance of the design so as to facilitate decision making in the conceptual design stage. The fourth paper by Tang et al. proposes a new design process model based on Axiomatic Design (AD) and Design Structure Matrix (DSM). Both AD and DSM are design process management methods but applicable to different stages of design. The rationale of this research work is to combine the two models to take their *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. weidong.li@coventry.ac.uk

Web-based collaborative conceptual design: an XML approach

The highly complex and informal data that have to be managed in the conceptual design phase still lacks of suitable computer support and integration with downstream application, such as the detailed design phase which is supported by lot of computer-aided design (CAD) tools. This paper therefore introduces an object oriented extensible markup language (XML) approach for sharing the users sketching intentions in a collaborative conceptual design environment. A light weight applet-based conceptual design tool is developed using a swing where a user can draw his sketches and store them in an XML format. The system ensures secured seamless integration of data with an in-built engine which automates the workflow once a design seed (initial needs, user requirements and design intentions, etc.) is sowed the system will fertilize it towards a product concept on its own intention. The automated designers’ interactions, on the other hand, will enhance the characteristics and behaviors of the product.

Compatibility Measurement in Collaborative Conceptual Design

A product consists of various sub-functions elaborated by alternative design principles which results in many combinations. In collaborative design, designers expect that their preferences over the combinations be respected during the combination process of sub-functions, resulting in compatible combinations. We formulate the selection of compatible combinations as a combinatorial problem by: (i) defining a design principle as a list of variables with their domain and direction of designer's preferences, (ii) considering constraints among design principles, (iii) characterizing the compatibility level of combinations. A vacuum cleaner is considered with dust bag, plastic bin or cyclonic design principles for the dust collection sub-function.

Guest Editorial

Guest Editorial

Quantification of Applicability of Shape Modelers in Collaborative Conceptual Design

AbstractDemand from the industry motivated software vendors to address the issue of supporting collaborative conceptual design by software tools. Considering the fact that a vast number of software tools have been developed to support a mixture of design activities of collaborative conceptual design (i.e. idea generation, presentation, reasoning, and modeling) from various aspects (e.g. functionality, shape, structure, behavior, sustainability, and service), selecting the most appropriate tools is a challenging task. One of the key problems is that there are no objective techniques and procedures to compare the tools and make a decision. We propose a new quantitative approach, which evaluates shape modelers by taking into consideration the cognitive aspects of collaborative conceptual design. Conceptual design is of a dynamic nature that originates in fast idea generation and modeling, evolving concepts, and coexistence of alternative solutions. On the other hand, collaborative aspect should be supported ...

Collaborative conceptual design—state of the art and future trends

This paper presents a state of the art review of existing research, projects, and applications in the domain of collaborative conceptual design, based on the Internet and Web technologies. The purpose of the review is to understand the needs for conceptual engineering design, to clarify the current conceptual design practice, to classify the available technologies, and to study the future trend in this area. The emphasis of this paper is to briefly outline the methodologies, architectures, and tools developed for the projects reviewed in this paper. It also uncovers approaches to conflict resolution and team/project management, as they are vital to a successful engineering design in a collaborative environment. More than 80 journal and conference papers and about 20 projects are reviewed based on the primary focus mentioned above. The selected research works are further categorised into several areas based on the application domain, design theory, and the technology used for implementation. The selected research projects and applications are basically for, but not limited to, the collaborative conceptual design.

Web-based Collaborative Conceptual Design

Formal design methods and techniques such as Quality Function Deployment, Value Analysis, and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis are, and should be, used as team tools. This paper proposes to exploit web technology to implement formal design tools on the Internet/ Intranet. Team members can use standard browsers to access these services at different locations. In comparison with standalone computerized design tools, web-based systems are effective in facilitating teamwork in product development.

Collaborative conceptual schema design

Recent years have seen an increased interest in providing support for collaborative activities among groups of users participating in various information systems design tasks such as, requirements determination and process modeling. However, little attention has been paid to the collaborative conceptual database design process. In this article, we develop a model of the collaborative conceptual schema development process and describe the design and implementation of a graphical multiuser conceptual schema design tool that is based on the model. The system we describe allows a group of users to work collaboratively on the creation of database schemas in synchronous (same-time) mode (either in a face-to-face or distributed setting). Extensive modeling support is provided to assist users in creating semantically correct conceptual schemas. The system also provides users with several graphical facilities such as, a large drawing workspace with the ability to scroll or “jump” to any portion of this workspace, zooming capabilities, and the ability to move object(s) to any portion of the workspace. The unique component of the system, however, is its built-in support for collaborative schema design. The system supports a relaxed WYSIWIS environment, i.e., each user can control the graphical layout of the same set of schema objects. The system ensures that changes/additions made by any user are consistent. Any conflicts that may compromise to the integrity of the shared schema are flagged and resolved by the system. The results from a preliminary experiment suggest that the use of our system in a collaborative mode improved information sharing among users, minimized conflicts, and led to a more comprehensive schema definition.

Interdisciplinary communication medium for collaborative conceptual building design

Collaborative conceptual design involves intensive cross-disciplinary communication of design concepts and decisions. Difficulty in producing and expressing such information leads to extensive delays, miscommunication and confusion, which often have an impact upon the quality of the final design and the time required to achieve design concensus. Computer tools provide little support for the special needs for representation and reasoning posed by cross-disciplinary communication in collaborative conceptual building design. By building upon design theory, literature and observations for a case study of an actual building design project, we identify and devise computational strategies for addressing these needs. Our objective is to help improve the communication among design team members. Our test case focuses on the communication between architects and structural engineers. We propose a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary communication to support collaborative conceptual design and present a prototype called Interdisciplinary Communication Medium (ICM). Our conceptualization suggests that designers propose a shared form model, interpret the form model into discipline models, critique the discipline form models to derive behavior and compare it to function, and explain the results to other members of the team. We present this propose-interpret-critique-explain paradigm as a communication cycle for collaborative conceptual building design. We explore and test the conceptualization by modeling it with an experimental software prototype, ICM, that integrates graphic representations and AI reasoning about, the evolving building design. ICM provides a graphic environment as the central interface to reasoning tools to support collaborative design.

Collaborative conceptual design: A large software project case study

During software development, the activities of requirements analysis, functional specification, and architectural design all require a team of developers to converge on a common vision of what they are developing. There have been remarkably few studies of conceptual design during real projects. In this paper, we describe a detailed field study of a large industrial software project. We observed the development team's conceptual design activities for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following eight months. In this paper, we emphasize the organization of the project and how patterns of collaboration affected the team's convergence on a common vision. Three observations stand out: First, convergence on a common vision was not only painfully slow but was punctuated by several reorientations of direction; second, the design process seemed to be inherently forgetful, involving repeated resurfacing of previously discussed issues; finally, a conflict of values persisted between team members responsible for system development and those responsible for overseeing the development process. These findings have clear implications for collaborative support tools and process interventions.