Collaboration in design optimization

Abstract

Tacit is a software tool for designing and solving 2D truss structures. The Tacit web application expands these features to allow users to design truss structures with integrated analysis and optimization tools. Tacit was intended for single user inter- action, but much of engineering and design work is team-based and collaborative. To examine the effects of collaboration on design optimization problems, it is crucial for users to be able to easily share and view the structure designs of their teammate. This thesis presents a new version of Tacit with these collaboration features along with a new method for assessing the similarity of pairs of structures created by collaborators, and the results and analysis of a user study conducted where participants collaborated on design optimization problems with these new functionalities. Results showed that collaboration and the collaborative software tools were both effective in improving performance. The new software functionalities improved the efficiency of collaboration but unintentionally reduced the amount of physical collaboration.