Model-Based Support for Management of Engineering Design Processes

This dissertation is concerned with the development of a modeling and simulation tool to support design process improvement and management. In spite of a long history of research into process modeling, there is still the lack of an overarching model that can be of practical use to effectively predict the future behavior of the process, and therefore can be applied into any kind of design processes. This dissertation has a socio-technical perspective on the design processes, and is dealt with modeling and management of uncertainty, which is mainly the result of multiple types and levels of interactions between actors and activities. The behavior of design tasks and designers therefore defined as drivers of the system that can affect the overall behavior of the process. The aim is to support managers with a sort of regulations and hints, not only on the content of the work, but also the way that it carries out, acting as information mechanism thorough the system. In this way, a new version of Signposting system is proposed, by making a balance between the detail rigor nature of dynamic task-based models, and the flexibility and abstraction of Social Networks models, so-called “Actor-Based Signposting” (ABS). Doing this way, a classification on the source of uncertainty presented, with the interactions structure in center, and consequently an expanded view on the interactions structure presented to represent various aspects of process behavior. A simulation tool then presented to support managers with a project-independent and scalable tool, which is user-friendly without the need of expertise for the application. Through some hypothetical cases, the proposed model implemented and analyzed subject to the process sensitivity to the actual constraints. The results confirmed that the ABS tool can potentially support managers and practitioners not only on the traditional planning issues (i.e. sequence of activities, association task-activity), but also on the identification of those criticalities due to actor influences, which can heavily impact the execution of design process and often determine its progress.