Concurrent engineering: Decomposition and scheduling of design activities

Design of complex products or large scale systems involves hundreds of resources (designers, analysts, computers, software systems, and procedures) and thousands of design activities. In this paper, a methodology is presented for decomposition of the design task into activities and modules. The methodology is based on clustering of design activities into groups that allow effective organization or resources required in the design process. A knowledge-based approach is used for managing design activities. The system performs analysis aiming at exploring concurrency and reducing the design project makespan.