Collaborative Research: Observing, Analyzing, and Modeling Design-Team Problem-Decompositions in Facility Design

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Engineers work in teams to solve complex system design problems like determining the layout of a factory or medical facility. Many problems are too complex to be solved all at once, so that engineers separate the problem into a set of subproblems and solve the smaller subproblems. Because this decomposition strategy affects the overall quality of the facility design, it is important that the teams use good decomposition strategies. This award supports fundamental research to gain understanding of how teams of engineers solve facility design problems and how their strategies affect the performance of the facilities they design. The research will study teams of engineers as they solve factory redesign problems and medical facility design problems. The medical facilities to be designed are points of dispensing, which are designed for dispensing medication to the public in a public health emergency. The results from this research will include guidelines for designing points of dispensing and other types of facilities. The results will be disseminated in scholarly publications and through short courses on facility design, enabling better points of dispensing, more productive factories, and economic benefits to manufacturing firms. Facility design problems are an important class of system design problems. The research team will identify the reasoning processes and problem decompositions used by design teams to solve facility design problems and generate hypotheses about which decompositions lead to better solutions. This in turn will enable future research on how to design better design processes. In a series of field studies, the research team will observe teams of human designers as they decompose and solve facility design problems. Using qualitative data analysis, the researchers will identify their decomposition strategies. This involves empirical observation of professionals solving two distinct instances of facility design problems during relevant training courses: teams of public health professionals designing a mass antibiotic distribution facility and teams of professional engineers redesigning a manufacturing facility. The results will describe how teams of engineers decompose design problems in realistic facility design settings, enriching the knowledge base of design theory for facility design in particular and system design more generally.