Team Design Processes and Decompositions in Facility Design

When faced with the problem of designing a complex system, a design team must make many decisions. Because many design problems are too difficult to solve all at once, the design problem is decomposed into more manageable subproblems. The way in which a problem is decomposed may affect the quality of the solution that can be constructed, especially when time and resources are limited. This paper describes the results of a study designed to (a) understand how design teams decompose complex design problems into sets of related subproblems and (b) assess the impact of these decompositions on the quality of the solutions that the design teams generate. In this preliminary study, we observed four teams of professional engineers who redesigned a manufacturing facility, and we analyzed their decision-making processes and the facility layouts that they generated. As we expected, teams used a variety of decomposition approaches. Some teams focused initially on designing manufacturing cells, while others began by laying out a high-level flow through the facility. These two strategies appeared to lead to different kinds of final facility designs (cellular and functional, respectively).