Abstract
This study proposes a methodology to analyse social networks among participating design engineers during product development projects. The proposed methodology enables product development managers or the participating design engineers to make a proper decision on product development considering the performance of participating design engineers. It considers a product development environment where an integrated product data management (PDM) system manages the product development data and associated product development processes consistently in its database, and all the design engineers share the product development data in the PDM database for their activities in the product development project. It provides a novel approach to build social networks among design engineers from an operational product development data in the PDM database without surveys or monitoring participating engineers. It automatically generates social networks among the design engineers from the product data and relationships specified by the participants during the design activities. It allows analysts to gather operational data for their analysis without additional efforts for understanding complex and unstructured product development processes. This study also provides a set of measures to evaluate the social networks. It will show the role and efficiency of each design engineers in the social network. To show the feasibility of the approach, it suggests an architecture of social network analysis (SNA) system and implemented it with a research-purpose PDM system and R, a statistical software system. A product configuration management process with synthetical example data is applied to the SNA system and it shows that the approach enables analysts to evaluate current position of design engineers in their social networks.