Model-based Approaches to Managing Concurrent Engineering

SUMMARY As design managers begin to implement concurrent engineering in order to reduce development time, design procedures can become more complex, potentially taking even greater time to complete. This paper discusses the basis for such design task complexity and presents a method for representing these constraints within a design process model. These models are used to explore several approaches for design process management. It is shown that while the feedback characteristic of concurrent engineering is essential to enhance design quality, this feedback causes iteration which can use up valuable engineering time. For concurrent engineering to save time, we require a framework for evaluating which tasks are vital to begin early in the development cycle, and which tasks should be left for later.