CONCURRENT ENGINEERING: Research and Applications A Dynamic Fuzzy Decision Support Scheme for Concurrent Design Planning

Abstract: Product design in concurrent engineering is a process that involves all the downstream product development activities. The interaction of these activities increases the complexity, the level of difficulty and the amount of iterations of product design. This work proposes a dynamic fuzzy decision support scheme that is able to provide a reasonable plan for an inherent iterative, complex product design. The plan serves as a guide for design tasks scheduling and can be adjusted dynamically according to the occurrence of some unexpected events. The proposed dynamic fuzzy decision support scheme is realized in a real-time manner. A heuristic priority algorithm based on the Fuzzy-AHP is embodied in it so as to deduce the priorities of design tasks to be executed under limited resources. Assigning design tasks to appropriate designers is based on the designer-job records stored in a database. The iteration inherently existing in product design is handled using a so-called iterative design analyzer developed by the authors. Besides, the dynamic fuzzy decision support scheme is capable of promptly capturing unexpected events or exceptions that are not uncommon in the process of new product design, as well as reacting to them with replanning. A case study on a burn-in system of a manufacturing company was used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic fuzzy decision support scheme. Key Words: concurrent product design, dynamic scheduler, design iteration, heuristics. 1