INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN ICED 97 TAMPERE , AUGUST 19-21 , 1997 DISTRIBUTED COOPERATIVE SYSTEMS DESIGN

Modern design of large complex systems requires cooperation among many agents (humans or computers) that may be physically separated and/or operating under diverse environments (e.g., cultural or computational). Global product development requires conceiving and implementing a distributed cooperative system design capability. This is both a managerial and a technical challenge. Here we address some key technical characteristics of such a system motivated by automotive system applications. The major elements of the design capability are: (i) an appropriate computational infrastructure that uses an object-oriented environment; (ii) a system synthesis process that uses mathematical optimization with formal model-based decomposition and coordination strategies; and (iii) a common object database that uses voxels to represent geometric and material data.