Characterizing Distributed Concurrent Engineering Teams: A Descriptive Framework for Aerospace Concurrent Engineering Design Teams

Abstract

As aerospace missions grow larger and more technically complex in the face of ever tighter budgets, it will become increasingly important to use concurrent engineering methods in the development of early conceptual designs because of their ability to facilitate rapid assessments and trades in a cost-efficient manner. To successfully accomplish these complex missions with limited funding, it is also essential to effectively leverage the strengths of individuals and teams across government, industry, academia, and international agencies by increased cooperation between organizations. As a result, the existing concurrent engineering teams will need to increasingly engage in distributed collaborative concurrent design. This paper is an extension of a recent white paper written by the Concurrent Engineering Working Group, which details the unique challenges of distributed collaborative concurrent engineering. This paper includes a short history of aerospace concurrent engineering, and defines the terms 'concurrent', 'collaborative' and 'distributed' in the context of aerospace concurrent engineering. In addition, a model for the levels of complexity of concurrent engineering teams is presented to provide a way to conceptualize information and data flow within these types of teams. Nomenclature CE= Concurrent Engineering CET = Concurrent Engineering Team

Creating and Validating a Model to Support Aerospace Engineering Students' Coordination of Knowledge about a Design

“…20 Multidisciplinary optimization, the Design Structure Matrix, and the Task-Based Model are all approaches to engineering design that leverage the multidisciplinary nature by coordinating the knowledge flowing through the design process. [21][22][23][24] A review of research by Coates et al found that coordination is a concept that can be used to improve the engineering design process. 25 However, a wide range of models have been developed with little research to integrate these model's views into a cohesive and general perspective of coordination for engineering design.…”