Abstract
In recent years, considerable attentions have been given to collaboration and teamwork for product development in engineering communities. Engineering collaboration involves sharing and exchanging design objectives and information with other team members, detecting and resolving design conflicts, and integrating results of sub-tasks into overall solution. Our research views the collaborative product development process as a distributed decision-making process executed by an engineering team with members from different disciplines. Distribution of design activities among team members, on the one hand, reduces knowledge requirement for designers to carry out their sub-tasks, and, on the other hand, poses demand for smooth coordination among team members to deal with dependencies between the sub-tasks. We argue that to achieve efficient engineering collaboration, team members should share their objectives and values from the early stages of the product development. Our aggregated value model is an attempt to formalize collaborative engineering process. In this paper, we introduce three modes of collaboration, namely total distribution, partial aggregation, and total aggregation as different collaboration schemes and compared their advantages and disadvantages. After that, we present a formal aggregated value model of engineering decision-making process. Finally, an example is discussed to illustrate some of the interesting features of the proposed model in engineering practice.
