Expanding the Bottom-Up Design Approach Through Integrating Design Attitudes Into Set-Based Design.

Summary In distributed design systems, designers are related to each other through couplings, however they have limited control over the design variables. Any inconsistency in the design system can result in design conflicts through these couplings. Modeling designer attitudes can help to understand inconsistencies and manage conflicts in design processes. We expand the bottom-up design approach through agent-based modeling techniques to another level where designers can make decisions directly on their wellbeing values that represent how their desires are satisfied. Set-based design and constraint programming techniques are used to explore the imprecision of the design activities. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of our approach. The results show that the number of design conflicts and their harshness can be lowered when the design process is defined with our approach.Copyright © 2013 by ASME.