A collaborative design process model in the sociotechnical engineering design framework

Abstract

Collaborative engineering design involves various stakeholders with different perspectives. The design process is relatively complex and difficult to handle. Various conflicts always happen among the design tasks and affect the design team performance. Therefore, to represent the collaborative design process and capture the evolution of design perspectives in a structured way, it is critical to manage the design conflicts and improve the collaborative design productivity. This article provides a generic collaborative design process model based on a sociotechnical design framework. This model has a topological format and adopts process analysis techniques from Petri Nets. By addressing both the technical and social aspects of collaborative design activities, it provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among design tasks and perspectives of different stakeholders. Based on this design process model, a methodology of detecting and handling the design conflicts is developed to support collaborative design coordination.

Business process design: Process comparison and integration

“…De Cesare and Serrano (2006) proposed a framework to achieve the collaboration between business process and information analysts by mapping the constructs used in information system models to those used in business process models. Lu and Cai (2001) provided a methodology of detecting and handling the design conflicts to support collaborative design coordination. Seshasai et al (2005) described an integrated and collaborative framework for business design, which incorporates the notion of automated knowledge acquisition, discovery, management, and dissemination.…”

Collective rationality of group decisions in collaborative engineering

“…The perspective model of the stakeholders, the process model of the tasks, and the conflict management model of the group decisions are the three key elements of STF. Then, a more detailed decision making process, called Socio-Technical Co-construction Process (STCP), is developed (Lu and Cai, 2001), which extends STF to model social teamwork and technical task-work in collaborative engineering as a dynamic, co-construction process that creates team agreements via Participative Joint Decisions (PJD). From the theoretical side (see Figure 1), we have investigated the foundations and limitations of the rationality conditions from Arrow's theorem, and suggested some practical strategies to approach collective rationality based on unique features of the collaborative engineering practice.…”

Argumentation-based negotiation for collaborative engineering design

“…Organisational issues were also addressed for effective cooperation among designers (Levitt et al, 1993;Jin and Levitt, 1996). Viewing collaborative engineering not only as a technical problem but also a social one, researchers have proposed to consider social perspectives of designers and developed a socio-technical framework to model and support collaborative design (Lu and Cai, 2001).…”