AI enhancements for a CSCW for manufacturing systems design

In this payer, I describe the evaluation of two Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) prototypes to aid engineering teams in the design of an agile manufacturing facility. The CSCWs facilitated consideration of a large number of flexibility and, agility criteria associated with the design of manufacturing systems. Both prototypes support the following functions: anonymous inputs; parallel processing of information; group memory; electronic brainstorming; anal consensus building. One of the two CSCW prototypes included three enhancements to further improve consensus building in the design teams. The enhancements consisted of cardinal, ordinal and outranking algorithms; a counter-propagation neural network ibr preference aggregation; and a computer-aided design environment, The laboratory test results indicated that both CSCW prototypes provided effective support for design teams. However, the CSCW with Artificial Intelligent (AI) enhancements, outperformed the CSCW system without enhancements in several consensus variables.