This paper describes the aims, methodology and results of an empirical research project. The aim was to gather new insight about how collaborative decision-making processes in the conceptual engineering design phase of the product development process takes place. The insight contributes to bridging the gap between the theoretical development of new decision-making methods in academia and the needs of practitioners. The researchers observed, recorded and transcribed three workshops involving groups that were engaged in the collaborative decision-making processes. Through analysing the transcripts, a set of decision-making related activities was identi®ed. Each activity's time consumption was quanti®ed, and a number of decision-making process models at di erent levels of detail were developed. During this analysis, various observations on particular process characteristics were made. It was observed that generating formal structures and documentation was bene®cial to the decision-making process. This was particularly true with respect to developing problem understanding and consistency. The outcomes should be valuable for the design and development of improved decision-support systems.
The aims of this paper are (i) to introduce a set of activities found to occur during collaborative concept selection processes in engineering design; (ii) to discuss implications of their observed time contributions to such processes; and (iii) to describe the methodology used for this research. We identified a set of 12 main activities of which some were further divided into sub-activities. Their time contributions led us to 5 observations regarding some characteristics of the observed processes. In 3 workshops groups of differently experienced participants were recorded while carrying out concept selection tasks. The recordings were transcribed and a content analysis was conducted to identify the activities. Our findings may be further used as foundation for establishing a descriptive model of concept selection processes in engineering design.
Kurzfassung
Der Einsatz der ISYPROM-Methoden – Integrierte Produkt- und Prozessmodellierung, Design und Analyse von Systemarchitekturen und Modellübergreifender Variantenvergleich – zielt auf eine Effizienzsteigerung bei der Entwicklung von Systemvarianten sowie auf die Identifikation der optimalen Variante unter Berücksichtigung von produkt- und prozessrelevanten Leistungsparametern ab.
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