Team Formation in Concurrent Engineering Using Group Technology (GT) Concepts

Concurrent engineering (CE) has emerged as an essential design principle that facilitates rapid and efficient product development that is necessary to survive in today’s fiercely competitive environment. However, the lack of tools that address design team formulation and proper design task assignment in CE has made its application an immense challenge. In this article we explicitly address this issue by pointing out the relevance of its structure to cell-formation problem in cellular manufacturing (CM) and group technology. Particularly, interdisciplinary CE teams will be formulated as multifunctional machine-cells that process similar parts, in our case, design tasks requiring involvement of similar individuals. The fruitful marriage of the two disciplines, concurrent engineering and cellular manufacturing, opens the path towards utilizing the ample existing efficient algorithms of cellular manufacturing to concurrent engineering rather than re-inventing the wheel in developing methods in this respect. The paper in-hand also incorporate sequences (or routing in cellular manufacturing) to create work teams that can conduct similar tasks commonly known as work packages in a smoother manner that avoids unnecessary back and forth alterations and overlapping. In addition, to enable solving the task assignment problem in reasonable time for relatively larger problems, the developed framework integrates a fuzzy ART algorithm proven efficient in cellular manufacturing literature. The article also provides an illustrative example on executing the methodology on a design example and highlights its implications on task team assignments.