Cooperative design, manufacturing and assembly of complex products

As customer requirements rise and time to market shrinks the need for global sourcing of development, manufacturing, and assembly capacity increases. This paper presents a method for integrating design and manufacturing engineers from different companies into a virtual value-adding team. The method is based on network theory using circuits to describe the flow of information originating from customer requirements. These circuits sustain the context of specific activities to the overall task during requirements analysis, design, and system integration. A blackboard model based on the combination of these circuits together with design structure matrices visualizes and guides the course of action during a product development project. This blackboard enables international development consortia to work jointly on new products and processes in a selforganized manner with limited effort for project management. The design of a public transport system serves as an example to illustrate this method.