THE VIRTUAL DESIGN TEAM - A COMPUTER-SIMULATION FRAMEWORK FOR STUDYING ORGANIZATIONAL ASPECTS OF CONCURRENT DESIGN

Successful concurrent design requires a well organized design team. Without analysis tools for organization design, managers must rely on their experience or trial-and-error, rather on systematic genera lion and evaluation of alternatives, to design their organizations. Tire goal of the Virtual Design Team (VDT) research project is to develop computerized analysis tools to support the systematic design of organization structures for complex, project-oriented tasks. The Virtual Design Team is a computational discrete went simulation model that incorporates qualitative reasoning concepts derived from Artificial Intelligence research. VDT explicitly incorporates information processing and communication models from organization theory and allows qualitative predictions of organizational performance. VDT's behavior has been validated extensively for internal consistency. We have also validated that its behavior compares well with theoretical predictions about, and the observed behavior of, real design project teams for petrochemical refinery, offshore oil systems, and power plant construction projects.