Improving Collaborative Decision Making in New Product Development Projects Using Clustering Algorithms

Numerous decisions have to be made in early design processes. Often times they involve many actors, with the difficulty that they are shared across numerous parallel collaborative groups, for coordination and meeting scheduling reasons. This paper aims at facilitating collaborative decision-making process by grouping actors according to the relationships they have due to their assignment to decisions. Clusters of actors are proposed in order to provide decision makers with a temporary and complementary organization designed for making efficiently simultaneous collaborative decisions. This approach has been illustrated through actual data in a new product development project in the automotive industry.