Distributed design optimisation in collaborative product development by integrating analytical target cascading with kriging

In the current era of economic globalization, small and medium-sized enterprises have increasingly recognized the imperative of inter-company collaboration across the supply chain to enhance competitiveness. The effective utilization of distributed design resources has become crucial to address product complexity and shorter life cycles. Collaborative product development (CPD) has thus emerged as a common practice to achieve this goal, in which design teams, possibly dispersed across different companies, negotiate engineering solutions that not only fulfil the overall product development goal but also align with their own interests. This research proposes a novel approach by integrating Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) with Kriging to solve distributed optimal design problems in the context of CPD. The focus is to improve the iterative process of the ATC coordination strategy by incorporating the Kriging model to address the situation of limited information disclosure. Case studies of real-world engineering problems validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Test results show that it contributes not only to increasing the efficiency of the design process but also to improving the overall design quality in CPD.