A negotiation methodology for multidisciplinary collaborative product design

The collaborative design of a complicated mechanical product often involves conflicting multidisciplinary objectives, thus one key problem is conflict resolution and coordination among the different disciplines. Since the characteristics such as cooperative competition, professional dependence, compromise, overall utility and so on exist in multidisciplinary collaborative design (MCD), an effective way to gradually eliminate the conflicts among the multiple disciplines and reach an agreement is the negotiation by which a compromise solution that satisfies all parties is got. By comprehensively analyzing the characteristics in MCD and considering the benefit equilibrium among discipline individuals and team, a negotiation strategy is presented, which maximize the union satisfaction degree of system overall objective under the premise of ensuring the higher satisfaction degree level of each discipline's local objective. A design action of a discipline is abstractly expressed as a concession in the negotiation strategy, and a negotiation model used for MCD is generated by establishing the relation between concession and satisfaction degree. By the relation between satisfaction degree and objective function, the mapping relationship between satisfaction degree domain and physical domain is built to get the design solution. A negotiation process is planned, and a negotiation system framework is designed to support the negotiation among multiple disciplines and assist the different disciplines rapidly reach a consistent compromise solution. A design example of automotive friction clutch is given to illustrate the proposed method. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.