Decision processes in engineering design: A network perspective of stakeholder and task interaction

In recent years, there has been significant attention given to developing decision support methods and tools for engineering design. While advances in the formal, mathematical modeling and statistical mechanics based models have been impressive, this has not been the case for research attempting to reach beyond normative models to examine the cognitive and social factors that influence decision-making. In general advances have provided for either a top-down or bottom-up approach to decision-making; ignoring the requirements for both participant and task connectedness and dependencies. This paper describes an integrated modeling framework that uses a multi-network perspective of decision-making. The utility and extensibility of this framework are considered in discussion by way of examples from construction engineering design