TOOL FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF CONCURRENT CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING DESIGN

The following article presents in summary, a prototype computational t ool supporting localized design agents in the generation and managemen t of conceptual engineering design variants within a distributed concu rrent engineering design environment. The paper briefly introduces the philosophies motivating the work, a proposed methodology representing the need for the abstraction of a global design problem amongst a dis tributed Virtual design team, how this methodology proposes a generic, problem driven, framework supporting what is essentially a highly hum anistic and frequently extremely qualitative undertaking. The paper co ncludes by summarizing how this methodology has been translated into a prototype software tool called Go-Designer.