Research Area: | Research Publication | Year: | 2009 | ||
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Type of Publication: | Technical Report | ||||
Authors: | Devendorf, Erich; Lewis, Kemper | ||||
Abstract: | In distributed design individual designers have local
control over design variables and seek to minimize their own
individual objectives. The amount of time required to reach
equilibrium solutions in decentralized design can vary based on
the design process architecture chosen. There are two primary
design process architectures, sequential and parallel, and a
number of possible combinations of these architectures. In this
paper a game theoretic approach is developed to determine the
time required for a parallel and sequential architecture to
converge to a solution for a two designer case. The equations
derived solve for the time required to converge to a solution in
closed form without any objective function evaluations. This
result is validated by analyzing a distributed design case study.
In this study the equations accurately predict the convergence
time for a sequential and parallel architecture. A second
validation is performed by analyzing a large number of
randomly generated two designer systems. The approach in
this case successfully predicts convergence within 3 iterations
for nearly 98% of the systems analyzed. The remaining 2%
highlight one of the approach’s weaknesses; it is susceptible to
numerically ill conditioned problems. Understanding the rate at
which distributed design problems converge is of key
importance when determining design architectures. This work
begins the investigation with a two designer case and lays the
groundwork to expand to larger design systems with multiple
design variables. |
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Comments: | Design Automation Conference |
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Full text: DETC2009-87517.pdf
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