Performance analysis of collaborative design network

In a collaborative design process, design activities, people and design tools are connected each other for collaboratively finishing design tasks. A method based on complex network theory is proposed in this paper to analyze the performance of the process. Firstly, the collaborative design process is abstracted as a network named collaborative design network (CDN), and its elements of CDN, such as nodes, edges and weight of edges are defined. Then the topological and physical characteristics of the CDN are defined and analyzed for revealing its performances. Finally, a steam turbine rotor design process is studied as an example to illustrate the feasibility and availability of the proposed method.