Abstract. AEC practitioners commonly use discipline-specific computer-based information modeling and analysis processes today. However, these practitioners lack simple, flexible, formal frameworks to communicate and integrate these processes and information amongst multiple disciplines. They therefore struggle to quickly and accurately achieve balanced and near-optimal multidisciplinary designs. To address these difficulties, we are designing and testing Narratives: formal, visual descriptions of the design process that include representations, reasoning, and their interrelationships. This paper presents several Narratives, and discusses how they can help AEC practitioners and students better communicate and integrate their design processes and information and thus potentially improve their designs. 1 Introduction: Existing

Given the crucial role of process modeling in product development (PD) project management research and practice, and the variety of models proposed in the literature, a survey of the PD process modeling literature is timely and valuable. In this work, we focus on the activity network-based process models that support PD project management and present a comprehensive survey of the literature published in the last decade. To organize our survey, we use a framework based on the

Regular Paper This paper provides a foundation for modeling the set of activities and their relationships by which systems are engineered, or, more broadly, by which products and services are developed. It provides background, motivations, and formal definitions for process modeling in this specialized environment. We treat the process itself as a kind of system that can be engineered. However, while product systems must be created, the process systems for developing complex products must, to a greater extent, be discovered and induced. Then, they tend to be reused, either formally as standard processes, or informally by the workforce. We distinguish and clarify several important concepts in modeling processes, including: product development versus repetitive business processes, descriptive versus prescriptive processes, activities as actions versus deliverables as interactions, standard versus deployed processes, centralized versus decentralized process modeling, “as is ” versus “to be ” process modeling, and multiple phases in product development. We also present a basically simple yet highly extendable and generalized framework for modeling product development processes. The framework enables building a single model to support a variety of purposes, including project planning (scheduling, budgeting, resource loading, and risk management) and control, and it provides the scaffolding for knowledge management and organizational

Front-end design, from poorly defined user needs to conceptual design, is difficult to do, and difficult to teach. The process itself is typically experience-based and ad-hoc. Attempts to define a formal, teachable process are often unrealistic. Here, a new process is described, as well as a course built on using it as an educational experience.