A formalism to structure and parallelize the integration of cooperative engineering design tasks

To be truly effective, designers working in a distributed environment need to spend less effort on integration of their ideas and work and more on the actual design task. However, the distributed, sequential, and iterative nature of the process typically results in wasted resources and long lead times. The purpose of this research is the development of parallelism models for the configuration of design tasks to accomplish the most effective integration in a distributed environment. The analogy to parallel computing is described. Four dependence primitives are compared and a new one, codependence, is defined. Six types of integration function are defined. A new representation called IDM (iterative design model) is developed and explained relative to product design tasks. Advantages of IDM compared with previous approaches are also discussed.