Design co-ordination for concurrent engineering

This paper is the outcome of discussions directed at research issues in supporting design coordination. Design coordination is described as a high-level concept of the planning, scheduling, representation, decision-making and control of product development with respect to time, tasks, resources and design aspects. The need and hypothesis for supporting design coordination is given, and major bottlenecks, related research problems and associated questions are presented. The paper concludes that, while the primary objective of concurrent engineering would seem to be directed at considering aspects of design simultaneously, design coordination provides the means of integrating and controlling disparate activities, i.e. design coordination is a vehicle for the realization of concurrent engineering.