SYNERGY EFFECTS OF SHARING KNOWLEDGE DURING COOPERATIVE PRODUCT DESIGN

Individual designers have a limited range of knowledge, but the scope of such knowledge can be enlarged by sharing information, either among separate groups of designers or among individual designers within one group. The possibilities for generating new design solutions which ca nnot be obtained by an isolated designer, or by the simple addition of knowledge from other independent designers, are first discussed with reference to knowledge sharing in cooperative projects. Possibilities for creating new knowledge come into existence when designers in diffe rent fields share what they know. But cooperative work is feasible onl y when each partner can mutually benefit from sharing their knowledge. Second, a numerical measure for determining the viability of such coo perative work is proposed and practical procedures for determining the viability of cooperative work with designers are constructed. In the proposed decision-making method, synergy effects can be quantitatively evaluated by viewing changes in the Pareto optimum solution sets befo re and after knowledge sharing. Finally, applied examples of a project to design industrial robots are given to illustrate these synergy eff ects.