Modelling interactions to support and manage collaborative decision-making processes in design situations

Abstract

To cope with the increasing complexity of products, New Product Development (NPD) projects require the involvement of several designers coming from various functional departments. Designers' decisions imply modifications on different objects and are likely to affect the decision-making of other designers. Two kinds of collaborative activities are strongly inter-related: technical ones that result in decisions regarding the product definition and organizational ones that concern the project organization. In this paper, we aim at developing a new conceptual framework for modelling, managing and tracking decision-making processes that are knowledge-intensive and collaborative. This framework intends to help designers to support both technical and organizational decisions. Its originality comes from the concepts of "specific role" and "action plan" that enhance the recursive modelling of activities and are valuable at different detail levels of the decisionmaking processes: project, team and individual levels. Specific decision-making models and an industrial case study illustrate the relevance of the proposed framework. Keywords:Collaborative design, collaborative decision-making process, knowledge and information management, interaction modelling.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bonjour, E., Belkadi, F., Troussier N. and Dulmet M. (2008) 'Modelling interactions to support and manage collaborative decision-making processes in design situations', Int. J. This is the simplest form of interaction between actors without the need of a common goal. Communication is only a message transmission process, requiring both a sender and a receiver.The communication goals may be, for instance, the need for technical help and for an expert's opinion. Communication helps the actor to construct his/her decision but its goal is not a decision-making. Cooperation

Cloud-Based Collaborative Decision Making

“…A research study with a special focus on collaborative product design decisions in the European aircraft industry has been reported by Bonjour, Belkadi, Troussier, and Dulmet (2009). The study includes generic UML models that capture typical patterns of group decisions in product design scenarios.…”

Developing multiagent systems for design activity analysis

“…Some aspects of design activity such as situativity [4], the role of the context [15], the role of capturing of data resulting from design activities and supporting the creation of these data [16], the constructivist framework [17], visual reasoning [18], creative conceptual thinking [19], designing as a representation transformation process [20], the cognitive synchronization [21] and the socio-technical aspects [22,23] such as "specific role" and "action plan" [24] have been studied. The role of the "insight" through identification of the emerging relationships between requirements and the design solutions is also explored for controlling and acting on the design process [25,26].…”