Special Issue on a Complex Systems Perspective on Concurrent Engineering

Why can concurrent engineering projects take so long and cost so much, despite our best efforts to use such apparently sensible techniques as multi-functional design teams, set-based design, and computer-aided collaborative design tools? Consider for example the Boeing 767-F redesign program. Some conflicts were not detected until long (days to months) after they had occurred, resulting in wasted design time, design rework, and often even scrapped tools and parts. It was estimated that roughly half of the labor budget was consumed dealing with changes and rework, and that roughly 25–30% of design decisions had to be re-worked. Since maintaining scheduled commitments was a priority, design rework often had to be done on a short flow-time basis that typically cost much more (estimates ranged as high as 50 times more) and sometimes resulted in reduced product quality. Conflict cascades that required as many as 15 iterations to finally produce a consistent design were not uncommon for some kinds of design changes. All this in the context of Boeing’s industry-leading concurrent engineering practices. The dynamics of current collaborative design processes are thus daunting, and have led to reduced design quality, long design cycles, and needlessly high costs. The emerging discipline of complex systems research offers a new and potentially powerful perspective on these problems, by attempting to understand the dynamics of distributed systems using such concepts as chaos, power laws, self-similarity, emergence, selforganization, networks, adaptation, evolution, and so on. It has proven to be quite fruitful, offering powerful and intriguing explanations and prescriptions for phenomena ranging from vehicle traffic to global economies to evolution to the weather. This special issue collects five papers that apply the complex systems perspective to concurrent engineering.