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Abstract

Successful concurrent design requires a well organized design team. Without analysis tools for organization design, managers must rely on their experience or trial-and-error, rather on systematic generation and evaluation of alternatives, to design their organizations. The goal of the Virtual Design Team (VDT) research project is to develop computerized analysis tools to support the sys tema tic design of organ iza tion structures for complex, project-oriented tasks. The Virtual Design Team is a computational discrete event simulation model that incorporates qualitative reasoning concepts derived from Artificial Intelligence research. VDT explicitly incorporates information processing and communication models from organization theory and allows qualitative predictions of organizational performance. VDT's behavior has been validated extensively for internal consistency. We have also validated that its behavior compares well with theoretical predictions about, and the observed behavior of, real design project teams for petrochemical refinery, offshore oil systems, and power plant construction projects.

Keywords

Organization design simulation" concurrent & engineering coordination.

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The Virtual Design Team: A Computer Simulation Framework for Studying Organizational Aspects of Concurrent Design

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