IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol.64, No.7, 2913-2920, 2019
A Coordinate Optimization Approach or Concurrent Design
In concurrent design (CCD), multiple design teams execute their tasks simultaneously and then exchange information to update their designs. The process then iterates until the termination criterion is met. When properly controlled and executed, CCD can be an effective method to shorten the time in product development for complex and large-scale projects thanks to its parallel nature. In this note, we propose a coordinate optimization framework to model and control team coordination through information sharing in CCD. It can be shown that under a certain convexity assumption, CCD converges to a globally optimal design if the information sharing intensity is smaller than a certain threshold. Numerical experiments substantiate the theoretical results.