In recent years, many manufacturing organizations have sought to transition from waterfall development to concurrent development in order to reduce the man-hours required for product design. Realizing concurrent development requires clarifying the interdependencies among design information and establishing systems that promote close collaboration between design departments. This study explores a method for enabling concurrent development through system modeling based on electrical and mechanical design processes that traditionally follow a waterfall approach. As a first step, we developed a system that visualizes cross-departmental design relationships using models that structure electrical and mechanical design information independently. Furthermore, by representing the interaction between design elements in the model, the system automatically reflects changes in the mechanical design triggered by updates in the electrical design and automatically notifies the user of design tasks required in the mechanical design. These methods are expected to facilitate the parallel execution of design tasks by enabling the coordination of design information and real-time information sharing.
MATSUO et al. (Wed,) studied this question.