Team Formation in Concurrent Engineering Using Group Technology (GT) Concepts

Abstract

Concurrent engineering (CE) has emerged as an essential design principle that facilitates rapid and efficient product development that is necessary to survive in today’s fiercely competitive environment. However, the lack of tools that address design team formulation and proper design task assignment in CE has made its application an immense challenge. In this article we explicitly address this issue by pointing out the relevance of its structure to cell-formation problem in cellular manufacturing (CM) and group technology. Particularly, interdisciplinary CE teams will be formulated as multifunctional machine-cells that process similar parts, in our case, design tasks requiring involvement of similar individuals. The fruitful marriage of the two disciplines, concurrent engineering and cellular manufacturing, opens the path towards utilizing the ample existing efficient algorithms of cellular manufacturing to concurrent engineering rather than re-inventing the wheel in developing methods in this respect. The paper in-hand also incorporate sequences (or routing in cellular manufacturing) to create work teams that can conduct similar tasks commonly known as work packages in a smoother manner that avoids unnecessary back and forth alterations and overlapping. In addition, to enable solving the task assignment problem in reasonable time for relatively larger problems, the developed framework integrates a fuzzy ART algorithm proven efficient in cellular manufacturing literature. The article also provides an illustrative example on executing the methodology on a design example and highlights its implications on task team assignments.

A win–win team formation problem based on the negotiation

“…A deterministic crowing evolutionary, which is suitable to design different alternatives of the divisions of students and to evaluate the alternatives according to the grouping criterion, is introduced to divide the students into the given number of team. In addition, Aleisa et al (2011) proposed the fuzzy artificial neural network algorithm. The problem of assigning work packages to the team members is addressed and a team is formed accordingly in the concurrent engineering.…”

Making Formwork Design Lean

“…Problems identified in the product development process can thus be considered in the design phase, ensuring that resulting designs comply with the requirements of each phase. This can substantially reduce design changes, product R&D time, and costs, while improving quality and enterprise competitiveness (Aleisa et al, 2011).…”

“…Poor design frequently results in change orders and waste, such as rework during construction (Anastasopoulos et al, 2010;Aleisa, 2011). Waste caused by design error is analyzed to help understand the influence of design error on the construction phase.…”

Research and development techniques for early-warning satellite systems using concurrent engineering

“…It is important to attain efficient management for such complex projects. To date, many researchers have accomplished considerable work on the key technologies in the field of concurrent engineering, and most of them have focused on collaboration and team work (Aleisa et al, 2011;Cos xkun et al, 2016;Prasad, 1999). Some researchers have applied concurrent engineering technology to aerospace engineering.…”