A knowledge-driven, network-based computational framework for product development systems

Today's fast-paced product development (PD) environment brings many new challenges to the PD community. These challenges are mainly due to a drastic increase in the scale and complexity of engineered systems, which require the collaboration of functionally and geographically distributed resources within and outside a firm's boundary. To address these new challenges, this paper proposes a novel theoretical and computational framework for an enterprise-wide PD management system. The proposed framework considers an integrative view of the various dependencies that co-exist in three PD domains (i.e., people, products, and processes). Additionally, it provides a computational tool that links them together in a succinct and tractable way and provides an analysis method for assessing their influence on shaping the product development process. Using this framework, we suggest that the characteristics of how an organization acquire data, interpret information, and apply knowledge will impact the final architecture of a product. We demonstrate this framework by analyzing the development efforts for a software project called ROBOCODE.