A Study on the Collaborative Design Using Supervisor System

Abstract

In recent years, financial difficulties led engineers to look for not only the efficiency of the function of a product but also the cost of its development. In order to reduce the time for the development, engineers in each disciplinary have to develop and improve their objectives collaboratively. Sometimes, they have to cooperate with those who have no knowledge at all for their own disciplinary. Collaborative designs have been studied to solve these kinds of the problems, but most of them need some sorts of negotiation between disciplines and assumed that the negotiation will be done successfully. However, in the most cases of real designs, manager of each disciplinary does not want to give up his or her own objectives to stress on the other objectives. In order to carry out these negotiation smoothly, we need some sort of evaluation criteria which will show efficiency of the product considering the designs made up by each division and if possible, considering the products of the competitive company. In this study, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to calculate the efficiency of the design and showed every decision maker the directions of the development of the design. We newly called these kinds of systems as supervisor systems and implemented these systems in computer networks that every decision makers can use conveniently. Through simple numerical examples, we showed the effectiveness of the proposed method.