Blackboard approach in design planning for Concurrent Engineering environment

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a strategy that attempts to process as many product development tasks in parallel, and incorporate relevant life-cycle attributes as early as possible in the design phase in an effort to reduce the duration of design projects, save development costs, and provide better quality products. The implementation of such a strategy considerably increases the complexity of the design process and makes it more difficult to plan and manage. New approaches and tools based on artificial intelligence methodologies are needed to deal with the above complexity. This paper discusses an architecture that uses a particular type of database that is able to mimic human cognitive processes (called a blackboard database), as the basic tool for providing decision-making support for planning and controlling a CE design process. It is expected that a blackboard-based design planning model developed in the study will be able to support companies in a major technological change from sequential to concurrent engineering.