Modelling interactions to support and manage collaborative decision-making processes in design situations

To cope with the increasing complexity of products, New Product Development (NPD) projects require the involvement of several designers coming from various functional departments. Designers' decisions imply modifications on different objects and are likely to affect the decision-making of other designers. Two kinds of collaborative activities are strongly inter-related: technical ones that result in decisions regarding the product definition and organizational ones that concern the project organization. In this paper, we aim at developing a new conceptual framework for modelling, managing and tracking decision-making processes that are knowledge-intensive and collaborative. This framework intends to help designers to support both technical and organizational decisions. Its originality comes from the concepts of “specific role” and “action plan” that enhance the recursive modelling of activities and are valuable at different detail levels of the decisionmaking processes: project, team and individual levels. Specific decision-making models and an industrial case study illustrate the relevance of the proposed framework.