Modeling Design Processes and Designer Decisions with Advanced Petri-nets

The in-process decisions made by designers strongly influence both the process of designing and the manifestation of the designed artifact. When improvement of designing is intended, the organization of the process and the content of the designers’ decisions have to be concurrently considered. Due to the inherited complexity, application of a computerbased simulation tool can be an effective solution. Although there are several processmodeling tools available, none of them is dedicated to an integrated modeling of procedural and contextual aspects of designing. This paper proposes the application of advanced Petri-net (APN) as a means for modeling design processes together with the decision patterns of designers. An APN is a bi-layer allocated architecture with linked, bipartitioned, directed, and attributed multi-graphs. The APN modeling technique and graphical presentation formalism have been developed based on practical observations of design processes. The authors present the conceptualization and design process of a bottle for dishwasher detergent to demonstrate the adequacy of APN technique for simultaneous modeling of design actions and decisions.