A Computational Method for Task Allocation and Coordination in a Distributed Design Environment

Managing the product realization process is a difficult endeavor in today's global product development environment. Design project managers are required to form teams from geographically distributed designers as well as effectively manage the collaborative design process. In this paper, a computational method is proposed to aid design managers in allocating design tasks to geographically distributed designers and identify appropriate coordination mechanisms to manage the collaborative design process. The method involves three stages: i) arriving at an initial design task sequence using the design structure matrix through partitioning of design tasks into blocks of dependent, independent and interdependent tasks, ii) allocating of design tasks to design teams and the improvement of the design sequence accounting for the number of designers available and their competencies and iii) determination of design review meeting frequencies as a coordination mechanism for interdependent tasks using agent based modeling simulations.