Collaborative Decision Making Across Digital Interfaces

In distributed product realization problems, new paradigms and accompanying software systems are necessary to support the collaborative work of geographically dispersed engineering teams from different disciplines who have different knowledge, experience, tools and resources. In the context of prototyping product using SFF technologies, digital interfaces are constructed between engineering teams, especially between design and manufacturing teams, to separate their product realization activities. Across digital interfaces, each engineering team holds its own perspective towards the product realization problem, and each controls a subset of design variables and seeks to maximize its own payoff function subject to individual constraints. That is, engineering teams act like players in a team sport (i.e., a game) cooperating to achieve a set of overall goals. Hence, we postulate the use of principles from game theory to model the relationships between engineering teams. In this paper, a decision template is used as a digital interface enabling information about product realization activities to be transferred between engineering teams. Three game protocols are used to facilitate collaborative decision making without iteration across digital interfaces. A simple product realization scenario is introduced to demonstrate the efficacy of inserting digital interfaces between design and manufacturing teams.