Improving Process Performance of Distributed Set-Based Design Systems by Controlling Wellbeing Indicators of Design Actors.

Summary In new complex product development processes, the design problem is usually distributed to multiple actors from different disciplines. Each design actor has a limited responsibility in the design system. Therefore, each design actor has limited control over design variables and performance variables. However, design actors are not isolated since their design activities are coupled. This can generate design conflicts through inconsistencies among design objectives and working procedures. When the design convergence is not controlled, inconsistencies can distort the satisfaction equilibrium between design actors. This means that if a design actor aims at satisfying only his/her local design objective, other actors having conflicting objectives will be dissatisfied. Thus, individual satisfactions diverge. The intensity of conflicts is measured with the satisfaction divergence. In this paper we define wellbeing indicators in order to control the convergence of distributed set-based design (SBD) processes. Wellbeing indicators reflect design actors' satisfaction degree of their process desires. We performed a constraint programming Monte Carlo simulation of our SBD framework with a complex design problem. We compared the results of wellbeing indicators with the results of the processes where design actors do not use wellbeing indicators. It is shown that when design actors have some means to control their convergence, the solution space converges to a solution in satisfaction equilibrium while epistemic uncertainty of the design model is reduced. Some conflicts are therefore prevented and the satisfaction divergence is reduced, leading thus to an improved design process performance.