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IDENTIFYING AND COMPARING SUBPROBLEMS IN FACTORY DESIGN PROCESSES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

Jeffrey W. Herrmann ,
Erica Gralla  and
Mohammad Fazelpour
Jeffrey W. Herrmann
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
Erica Gralla
Affiliation:
George Washington University
Mohammad Fazelpour*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
Fazelpour, Mohammad, University of Maryland, United States of America, mfazelp@umd.edu

Abstract

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When a design team faces the problem of designing a complex system, they are required to make several decisions. Because such design problems are difficult to solve all at once, teams often decompose the design problem into several smaller subproblems. This paper discusses the results of a study designed to understand how design teams decompose a factory redesign problem into sets of related subproblems and compare the subproblems obtained for each design team. This exploratory study analyzed the design activities of eight teams of professionals and used clustering to group the variables that the design teams considered. We found that the design teams used different decomposition strategies and different subproblems, but they more often considered subproblems with design variables of the same type, and some teams followed a top-down design process.

Keywords

Human behaviour in designCollaborative designDesign processDecomposition
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 3: ICED23 , July 2023 , pp. 2195 - 2204
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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