Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Public Works ...

Arthur Baskin and Stephen C-Y Lu
5. General Requirements for Concurrent Engineering Tools
In order to transfer technology between disciplines we should understand how the challenges.
current techniques, and future requirements of the disciplines relate. Technology transfer bet%,een
disciplines based on such a foundation is more likely to be effective than the use of isolated
techniques. In this section we explore requirements originally developed for concurrent
engineering in manufacturing settings which should also apply to construction and civil works.
To develop a new design, engineers use their specific domain knowledge to generate geometrical
shapes and relationships which, in term, result in a set of data defining the product specifications.
For mechanical products, knowledge, geometry, and data are the three basic entities that
engineers must effectively deal with in order to make good decisions. At the beginning of the
computer-aided engineering era, many tools were developed to support data-intensive tasks such
as engineering data bases and simulation programs. Those tools are useful mainly for the later
stages of product development (e.g., analysis of product performance) where product knowledge
and geometry have already been decided. The development of various computer-aided drafting
and design programs (e.g., CAD) over the past two decades have produced computer tools for
geometry-intensive tasks. Those tools are useful during intermediate stages of development to
represent product knowledge in geometric forms to be converted into engineering data for
downstream activities. Recently, artificial intelligence (Al) techniques have been used to build
expert systems to support various engineering decision-making tasks (11). Although their full
potential is yet to be seen, Al-based tools should be more suitable for knowledge-intensive tasks
at earlier stages of product development than those traditional geometry- or data-oriented tools.
As engineers go through the early, intermediate, and late stages of product development, the
challenges of their tasks shift from being knowledge, geometry, and data intensive accordingly.
Therefore, as more computer tools are being developed to support early activities, the foci of
these software developments are being extended from data and geometry to knowledge about the
product. Unfortunately, current computer tools for supporting data, geometry, and knowledge
intensive tasks are often developed in isolation from each other. As a result, they are only useful
at a particular stage of the development process. To move from one stage to another, it is
common for engineers to change to different computer tools (e.g., data-based, CAD-based, or Albased)
to cope with the changing requirements of different product development tasks. This
results in many wasted efforts and prevents the integration of various product development
concerns required by concurrent engineering. To overcome these difficulties, more intelligent
software must be developed to support knowledge-intensive tasks and integrate with existing
geometry- and data-oriented tools (12). This section will examine some functional requirements
of computer tools that are useful for knowledge-intensive, decision-making tasks in concurrent
engineering. Specifically, we will discuss these requirements (denoted as R) according to their
roles in the following activities needed for concurrent engineering:
integration of complementary engineering expertise (R-a-),
cooperation of multiple competing perspectives (R-b-),
communication of upstream and downstream concerns (R-c-), and
coordination of group problem-solving activities (R-d-).
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