A Risk-based Global Coordination System in a Distributed Product Development Environment for Collaborative Design, Part I, Framework

This is the first of a two-part paper introducing a risk-based global coordination system in a distributed environment for collaborative design. Part I presents the basic concepts and a theoretical framework, and Part II describes the implementation and practical application to a National Science Foundation supported collaborative network. In a distributed environment, local negotiations within a stakeholder group (intra-stakeholder) and global negotiations among stakeholders (inter-stakeholder) co-exist. Strategic support is necessary to facilitate the integrative negotiation at the both intraand interlevels for effective distributed decision making. The challenge is that the distributed stakeholders have different subjective risk perceptions, interpretations and evaluations, which can be inconsistent and incoherent from a global perspective, and thus create considerable barriers for effective negotiation and coordination. Our approach is to (1) understand and capture heterogeneous risk evaluations at intraand inter-levels, (2) represent and quantify all participants’ subjective risk evaluations using a uniform structure, and (3) facilitate the negotiations through a risk-based coordination mechanism designed to achieve a globally consistent risk assessment (building consensus). The long-term goal of this work is to achieve a more fundamental understanding and develop useful tools for effective collaborative design.