Research On The Collaborative Design Process Based On Group Decisions

With the rapid development of global economy and technology, the global competition is becoming increasely fierce. One of the strategies which the manufacturing firms take to face the challenges is collaborative design. Collaborative design is conducted by a group of people with different purposes, circumstances, and expertise. The collaborative design activity is a Socio-Econo-Technical process. It also is a group decision-making process. The design process has dynamic and sensitive features as a complex process. Traditional design theories and methodologies always focus on the technical and economical aspects of collaborative design. With the development of IT technologies, the features of design process such as sociality, complexity and dynamics have more impact on the design solutions. Therefore the new methodologies and theories on collaborative design should be developed. Therefore, the analysis methods and control models should be investigated based on these characteristics in order to study collaborative design. This research develops a comprehensive approach to analyze and control collaborative design process. Furthermore, to successfully support collaborative design, it provides a methodology to facilitate group decision-making during the design process.After the investigation of the fundamental characteristics of collaborative design, four critical issues are identified. They are design process model, analysis and control of design process, group decision-making and decision support. This research develops systematic methods to manage and visualize collaborative design process by implementing these issues. The group decision-based collaborative design process model has been established by comparing current design process models and methodologies. This model consists of five elements including process variables, criteria, alternatives, decisions and solutions and can be used to represent the dynamics and evolution of design process. Collaborative design can be treated as a group decision making process with this model used to analyze the social features of participants and relations between them. According to the analysis of the model, the design theory framework for collaborative design based on group decision is presented. The model can generate the design solutions according to the perspectives, preferences and cognitive features of participants.During the design process, different designers will concern different factors. The hierarchical relations between the design factors construct design processes. To collaborative design, participants design in different locations with network which makes the relations more complex. The process elements are layered and recreated with structure modeling method and path algebraic method. The control and analysis methodology is used to construct and plan the design process structure and proved to manage the relations between design factors. The multi-perspective multi-criteria decision-making methodology on group structure and features is proposed to study the effect of participants'characteristics on the design process. The participants'characteristics including the perspectives, relative importance, and acceptance are introduced to this methodology which can represent the dynamics of design process efficiently based on participants'perspective model. This method also can help participants to make efficient decision during the design process. Finally a collaborative design group decision support system is developed based on the models and methodologies presented in this research. The system can provide distributed and collaborative decision-making application because of n-tier architecture. The architecture is developed with CSLA and Nhibernate.