Method for identifying work groups in a complex design process

摘要

Today, collaborative engineering is seen as a structure of considerable interest in the manufacturing engineering community. However, this structure does not simplify the design process, rather it adds a tremendous amount of inter-tasks coupling which makes the overall work considerably more difficult. Consequently, it is important to provide methods that allow to structure and to effectively control the work process. In this paper, the authors propose a method for analyzing a complex design process in order to structure it into a set of work groups and to schedule them. The first step is based on Steward and Eppinger's work. It aims at modeling intertask dependencies by means of a matrix called Design Structure Matrix and then at reorganizing this matrix in order to optimize the information flow. However this method can define work groups collecting a large number of actors and consequently can lead to a complex management of these groups. The second step is then to break the initial work groups to obtain smaller groups. For this, we propose to apply a spectral algorithm which takes into account criteria relative to workload balancing. The interests to apply this method to complex collaborative work are studied in this paper.