Tool for the management of concurrent conceptual engineering design

The following article presents in summary, a prototype computational tool supporting localized design agents in the generation and management of conceptual engineering design variants within a distributed concurrent 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 distributed Virtual design team, how this methodology proposes a generic, problem driven, framework supporting what is essentially a highly humanistic and frequently extremely qualitative undertaking. The paper concludes by summarizing how this methodology has been translated into a prototype software tool called Go-Designer.