Enhancing CSCW with Advanced Decision Making Tools for an Agile Manufacturing System Design Application

Author: Monplaisir L.

Source: Group Decision and Negotiation, Volume 11, Number 1, January 2002 , pp. 45-63(19)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) can provide an efficient decision-making environment for multi-disciplinary teams faced with the challenge of evaluating agile manufacturing systems. In this paper, the development and evaluation of CSCW prototypes to aid the systematic evaluation of agile manufacturing systems are described. An industrial case study involving the evaluation of alternative design configurations of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS) for agile manufacturing was used for testing with twelve multi-disciplinary teams. The results obtained suggest that engineering design teams can obtain productivity improvements through the use of CSCW tools. The results indicate that CSCW systems can assist decision-makers in reaching consensus especially when advanced decision making tools are incorporated into the problem-solving framework. In this study, we also found that an enhanced CSCW with a neural network module for preference aggregation outperformed a basic CSCW in: (1) decision quality, (2) users' satisfaction and agreement, (3) consensus. These results also have far reaching implications for distributed product development teams that face the problem of reaching consensus on a range of alternative designs with stringent pressures to reduce development time.

Keywords: agile manufacturing; CSCW; decision support; neural network; product design

Language: English

Document Type: Regular paper

Affiliations: 1: Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA E-mail: monpla@mie.eng.wayne.edu

Publication date: 2002-01-01