RESEARCH ARTICLE

An application of game theory in distributed collaborative decision making

  • Angran XIAO
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  • Department Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design Technology, New York City College of Technology, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA

Received date: 08 Apr 2018

Accepted date: 25 Apr 2018

Published date: 05 Mar 2019

Copyright

2019 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Abstract

In a distributed product realization environment, new paradigms and accompanying software systems are necessary to support the collaborative work of geographically dispersed engineering teams from different disciplines who have different knowledge, experience, tools and resources. To verify the concept of collaboration by separation, we propose a generic information communication medium to enable knowledge representation and exchange between engineering teams, a digital interface. Across digital interfaces, each engineering team maintains its own perspective towards the product realization problem, and each controls a subset of design variables and seeks to maximize its own payoff function subject to individual constraints. Hence, we postulate the use of principles from game theory to model the relationships between engineering teams and facilitate collaborative decision making without causing unnecessary information exchange or iteration across digital interfaces. A product design and manufacturing scenario is introduced to demonstrate the efficacy of using game theory to maintain a clean interface between design and manufacturing teams.

Cite this article

Angran XIAO . An application of game theory in distributed collaborative decision making[J]. Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering, 2019 , 14(1) : 85 -101 . DOI: 10.1007/s11465-019-0523-4

Acknowledgments

The research was performed at the Systems Realization Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Department of Mechanical Engineering Technology and Industrial Design at New York City College of Technology.
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