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

Arthur Baskin and Stephen C-Y Lu
decisions without keeping track of their heritage. They act as "static cameras" taking snap shots
of product development results. Concurrent engineei a;:' tools must be able to record histories,
assumptions, rationale of various decisions. Such rc,t,,' ds can minimize the risk of making
changes which violate early assumptions, provide bases for systematic conflict resolutions, and
facilitate communication and coordination among product development team members (see R-cand
R-d-).
(R-b-2) Automate consistency maintenance: Most existing tools are "inactive" in the sense
that they allow inconsistent specifications to exist in the product model before its execution. A
way to minimize changes at later stages is to have computer tools that can immediately
"complain about" (or detect) inconsistent decisions at the time when they occur. Such reactive
tools are very useful for supporting individual and group "what-if" analyses to ensure that
innovations do not violate the global states of consistency. Since the burden of maintaining
consistency is shifted from human to computers, engineers will be more willing to try new
alternatives, consider different opinions, and accept "better" ideas from others.
(R-b-3) Facilitate conflict management: Competing perspectives lead to conflicts which must
be detected and resolved before the product development process can proceed. In a typical
product development team, a significant portion of engineers' time and resources are spent
detecting and resolving conflicts. Therefore, computer tools that support conflict management
activities will be of great value to concurrent engineering. Methods must be developed to
automatically identify the sources of conflicts, suggest possible resolution strategies, and
summarize consequences of proposed changes. Once certain changes are decided to be necessary
(by either engineers or computers with human consent), the tools should automatically carry out
these changes (with human supervision) and detect any side-effects. Decision histories and
rationale play an important role in automatic conflict management as previously explained.
(R-b-4) Provide comprehensible explanations: The ability to explain ones decisions to other
concerned parties in a comprehensible manner is crucial to integration, cooperation, and
coordination among product development team members. Computer tools which can provide
understandable explanations of decisions will be beneficial to engineers who often need to
explain what they did, how and why they did it to their colleagues. This requires more than just
printing out pre-stored textual information. The explanations must be automatically tailored to
particular viewpoints with proper levels of details for those concerned engineers. Graphical
representations of explanations (e.g., graphs of dependency networks) are often useful for easy
comprehension. Again, good records of decision histories and rationale play an important role
in these explanation activities.
5.3 Communication of Upstream and Downstream Concerns
Iterations and changes at later stages can be minimized if downstream product development
concerns can be communicated upstream to those who make decisions at early stages. Therefore,
computer tools must be developed to promote and support early communications among product
engineers to avoid iterations and changes (16). These tools must also provide representations of
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