a concurrent engineering simulation game - initial concepts ... - SAVIE

In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising – ICE 97. Concurrency for competiveness: towards the Concurrent Enterprise in the age of Electronic Commerce. Nottingham, UK, 8 – 10 October 1997. University of Nottingham, Nottingham 1997, S. 460 - 467

A CONCURRENT ENGINEERING SIMULATION GAME INITIAL CONCEPTS FOR NEW MEANS FOR THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING OF ENGINEERS FOR CONCURRENT ENGINEERING Dr. Richard Barson*, Jens Hoheisel**, Jyrki J. Kasvi***, Dr. Kulwant S. Pawar*, Frithjof Weber** * Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Operations Management University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Tel: +44 115 951 4029, E-mail: [email protected] **Department of ‘Produktionstechnik’, Research Unit ‘Produktionssystematik’ University of Bremen, Hochschulring 20, D-28359 Bremen, Germany Tel: +49 421 218 5536, E-mail: [email protected] ***Laboratory of Work Psychology and Leadership Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 9500, FIN-02015 Espoo, Finland Tel: +358 9 451 2852, E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT In the engineering area, Concurrent Engineering (CE) was proven as an efficient approach to increase a company’s competitiveness. Many tools support the implementation and operation of CE. However, there is no support for learning ‘how to do CE’, i.e. how to work in parallel or how to co-operate in a multi-cultural environment. There is a strong need for new educational approaches and tools, both in industry and universities. The need can be addressed by computerised simulation games, which show compelling benefits for education. However, their development is only in the early stages. Especially, there is only little experience about their usage for educating soft and human factors as required for CE. This paper presents the initial concepts for a Concurrent Engineering simulation game for the education and training of engineers and students. The game can be played by individuals, using the computer as the gaming partner, or in a distributed group, using advanced telecommunication technologies. The paper names the education and training needs for CE and outlines the state-ofthe-art in simulation gaming. It describes the conceptual approach for the CE simulation game from pedagogical and technical viewpoint and proposes its integration in European education networks. The paper ends by raising a set of stimulating questions for future research and requirements specification. INTRODUCTION Concurrent Engineering (CE) has become a buzzword for good engineering practice during the last years and many success stories can be found in practice and literature (Trygg 1992), (Shina 1993), (Ettlie, Stoll 1990), (Charney 1991). Companies acting in a global environment feel a strong need to turn to this practice for remaining competitive in their product development. CE and its principles have been examined in detail and many approaches and tools for implementing CE have been developed. However, they all focus on CE from the

management perspective and not from the practitioners’ viewpoint. They fall short in actually describing how to do CE. Questions which are not answered on the operational level and which are by far not obvious address: • How to really work in parallel? • How to co-operate and manage disputes and conflicts in a multi-national, multicultural environment? • How to communicate effectively in a globally distributed enterprise? Existing curricula in universities and training departments do not fulfil the need for learning how to do CE and especially engineering departments still concentrate on the technical engineering aspects only. Training activities in companies are reduced to software training and similar objectives. Our education and training systems concentrate on tools, not the tasks to be done with them. A training for increasing cooperation or coordination does hardly take place. All in all, these aspects makes the transition of a company towards sophisticated CE difficult. Thus, there is a strong need for new training and education approaches, enabling engineers to co-operate with CE principles in a global environment (Hirsch, Thoben, Hoheisel 1996). Addressing this need, the here suggested approach is based on the idea to use computerised simulation games for learning how to do CE, how to work in parallel in a CE environment and how to co-operate with others. The authors aim to develop a CE simulation game that can be played by individuals, using the computer as the gaming partner, or in a distributed group, using advanced telecommunication technologies. The rationale to use a game is to exploit the potential of gaming, i.e. to experience instead of just to perceive. People can be motivated by gaming more than by listening to presentations or similar training methods, and the learning result can be expected to be higher. Being attractive, novel, entertaining, and a kind of ‘adventure’, gaming makes curious and can be utilised to impart knowledge in an effective way. It can serve as a positive and productive diversion from daily routine work. In addition, the simulation can also serve to test and verify the learning results achieved. This paper describes the authors’ initial concepts for the CE simulation game. The development will be carried out in a European research project, partly funded by the European Commission’s Educational Multimedia Task Force (COSIGA – A Concurrent Engineering Simulation Game, project no. 2281). As a position paper for the ICE’97 conference, this paper is intended to initiate the discussion about the game, its objectives and the taken development approach. Especially, it shall stimulate industry and academia to specify their requirements for the game from different sides (pedagogics, technology, contents, learning goals, success factors, etc.). Thus, the paper does not present validated and consolidated research results, but instead ideas and plans for the game to be developed. The paper starts with a description of the education and training needs for ‘concurrent engineers’. This is followed by an outline of the current state-of-the-art in related simulation gaming. Chapter 4 describes the conceptual approach for the CE simulation game from pedagogical and technical viewpoint. Chapter 5 takes a European perspective and proposes the usage of the game in European networks. The paper

ends by raising a set of questions which the authors’ feel as relevant for their future research and development and which shall stimulate further questioning and requirements specification. EDUCATION AND TRAINING NEEDS As CE is a relatively new concept, even experienced designers and developers need training on the subject in order to keep their professional skill base up to current requirements. Lifelong learning has usually been associated with keeping up to technological development, but communication and social skills require development and upkeep too. Students entering a university engineering course usually have a very little understanding of industrial and business practices. The university teachers, in a relatively short time, have to equip them with the required skills, engineering principles, techniques and practices and simultaneously maintain academic excellence. A brief survey of different engineering courses shows that a typical engineering course initially focuses on engineering principles, mathematics and computing. These disciplines are further developed in detail and in higher semesters, focus shifts to specific techniques and technologies like e.g. Rapid Prototyping, CAD/CAM or TQM. Group projects and exercises are normally used to illustrate the inter-relations between various tools and techniques. Increasingly, Concurrent Engineering modules are used to demonstrate these interactions. A typical CE module structure comprises principles of CE and application of tools & techniques like QFD, FMEA, DFMA, EDM and strategies for team work. However, the fundamental requirements of CE are cooperation, parallelism, goal sharing, customer focus and continuous process improvement etc. (Pawar, Thoben, Oehlmann, 1995) These principles must be applied in a multi-disciplinary, multifunctional, multi-cultural and a highly competitive and dynamic global industrial environment (Prasad, 1996) and often this has to be done in a physical or virtual colocated environment. (Pawar, Sharifi,1996) Thus, the educators not only have to teach the latest developments in the field of CE but more importantly they must focus on teaching how to implement CE in a highly competitive and dynamic global context. This however, is not supported by existing approaches. This viewpoint was raised as a major concern by employers at a recent public workshop on CE (Walker, Weber 1997). Hence, there is a strong need for new training and education approaches and means to educate engineers to practice CE. This viewpoint is further supported by the findings of a recent report by the Royal Academy of Engineering where it is claimed that there is an urgent need to increase the number of the appropriately qualified engineers (HEI News 1997). The report proposes a new degree course structure, making courses more interesting, exciting and relevant to prospective students. Design, teamwork and communication skills must be integrated with sound understanding of the fundamental principles of engineering. Major requirement is that students can experience working in a product development area with utmost realism. Effective CE education needs a learning-by-doing approach characterised by moving from passive perception to active experience. However, there are not enough real life situations that can be used for education or training, since in many real life cases the occurrence of errors – which are natural in learning

situations – is not acceptable. Simulation games (Riis, 1995) using advanced information and communication technology can be used as a substitute in order to meet this need. STATE-OF-THE-ART No equivalent training tools do exist on the CE field in spite of the fact that there is an acute need for trained CE specialists and the technology required has been available for some time now. The potential of a CE simulation game has been left unutilised due to the interdisciplinary nature of the application domain: Multimedia and networking specialists are not familiar enough with pedagogical concepts and trainers and work psychologists are not competent enough with new technologies and CE practices. Technical systems like production lines have been successfully simulated with computers for decades, but simulations and games of social systems, for example organisational change processes, are still manual, relying on human specialists for facilitation. These human facilitated simulation games are widely used for training and innovation purposes. At Helsinki University of Technology and University of Bremen, for example, simulation games for educating teamwork, global production processes or administration workflow have been developed and used for education. The few computer based simulation environments that can present human beings (e.g. Quest and Automod), handle them as technological or ergonomic, not as social or psychological entities. This failing is common to all training applications of computer technologies and is actually seen as one of the main reasons why multimedia has not become as successful a training and education medium as anticipated. However, most real life skills are like concurrent engineering, i.e. they involve both technical and social aspects. A new approach is required to combine the best practices of human and computer managed training tools. For time being, when it comes to simulating human behaviour and social interaction with computers, the best practice can be found in entertainment software, i.e. computer games. In order to motivate the players for hours, the game settings, the simulation models have to be deep and detailed enough to provide an enthralling and captivating experience. However this practice has not yet been transferred to educational and business environments, which has to be seen as the major challenge for the development of the CE simulation game. One of the leaders in the field of simulation games is Maxis, the innovator of the Sim set of simulation games (e.g. SimCity, SimPark). These games have already an educating element and the users receive a direct feedback about the results of their actions. In SimCity, for example, the user will be confronted with traffic chaos if he does not build enough streets and improve public transport when the city is growing. Whilst Maxis concentrates on recreational games, Thinking Tools Inc. was spun off as the business simulation division. It produces PC-based business simulation software which enables users to simulate real-life business situations, explore complex operational problems and improve their decision-making and problem-solving skills. The tools combine a game-like interface with agent-based programming. Products from this company include LogLab, a simulation of military logistics, TeleSim, a simulator for the telecommunications industry and SimHealth, a simulation of the United States health care system. In Europe, the London Business School, has a training pro-

gramme where management students create simulation models of real life business situations and turn them into management games called Microworlds. Recently, the interest of the entertainment software industry has focused on networked simulations and games, where players share a common playground for communicating and competing with each other in spite of being geographically dispersed. These, typically TCP/IP based distributed gaming technologies can also be applied to develop distributed CE training tools. The University of Minnesota Geometry Center has developed an object-oriented toolkit (W3Kit) for building interactive World Wide Web applications which together with current WWW technology (Java, ActiveX) can be used to develop interactive simulation games. When it comes to near future, the relevant technologies include shared virtual environments. Virtual environments have been developed mainly for design, demonstration and entertainment purposes. But as the Virtual Environment Technology Laboratory of the University of Houston and NASA Johnson Space Center, who are experienced with aerospace training, point out, virtual environments have training applications too. Summarising the current state-of-the art, multimedia technology and its training applications are not in balance. On one hand, modern computer technologies like multimedia and networking are not properly exploited to train skills involving social or organisational skills. On the other hand, human managed social and organisational games have yielded good learning and motivational results. The challenge lies in integrating this expertise into a computerised simulation game without losing critical elements in the process. CONCEPTUAL APPROACH FOR A CE SIMULATION GAME Taking up the industrial and academic needs and exploiting state-of-the-art technology, the authors aim to develop a multimedia simulation game for the education and training of European engineers and engineering students in CE. The game can be played by individuals, using the computer as the gaming partner, or in a distributed group, using (e.g.) the Internet as a communication means. The users will interact in a product development scenario where they have to carry out specific tasks and will experience direct feedback as a results of their actions. Key elements of the game will be a built-in functionality allowing the users to measure and evaluate the impact of their actions along with the product design and development process. The assessment will be made against typical CE success measures i.e. reduction in time to market, increased parallelism, improved customer focus, faster response time and reduction in costs etc. The game will allow individual and group gaming in a multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-functional, distributed environment. The need for utmost realism defines highest requirements for intuitive and realistic user interfaces. The following sections describe in more detail the pedagogical and technical approach and underlying concepts for the development of the game. PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH The major learning goals that shall be supported with the simulation game are:

• to train CE students how to do CE (e.g. how to work in parallel, how to co-operate and how to communicate) • to train the students to analyse the critical incidents of the present CE practices • to develop new, formerly unknown CE practices The pedagogical approach is based on the reflexive learning style and the constructive learning theory, which means that learning is actually active construction of knowledge instead of passive reception of information. Learning based on simulations and games can be described as a learning cycle including the following four stages (cf. Figure 1): Concrete experience, reflexive observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation (Kolb 1994). The goal of these stages is to create a developed mental model in an individual and a shared knowledge among group members. These mental models can be applied in different practical contexts.

Figure 1: Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle In the beginning, concrete experience is gained through the use of the simulation. Trainees deal with the common model of the system and gain a common experience. This is followed by reflective observation, which means that the trainees communicate with each other analysing the experience. Through these reflections the trainees build a common abstract conceptual model of the real life system and the way it operates. This common model can be experimented in real life situations or through a more detailed simulation. A simulation is based on a model, representing a real life system, to be learned, in this case CE practices. This model can be simplified or revised in order to point out relevant or critical details of the subject, for example to train people on accident procedures. The quality of the model within the simulation is of critical importance for the learning outcomes. Trainees have been observed to use computer based simulations and games very eagerly. It has become a kind of a truism to say that ‘computer games and simulations simply motivate’. In addition, HUT studies on human managed workflow and

organisational simulations and co-operation games have shown that the effect is not computer dependent. Even human managed social and organisational games and simulations have proven very motivating and efficient training tools and catalysts of innovation and development. In addition to motivational aspects, games and simulations have been found to deliver better learning results and transfer than other kinds of CBT applications. A game provides a common experience for the trainees which forms a good basis for creating shared perceptions. Simulations and games allow trainees to actually put their new learning into practice, to train new skills hands-on, to involve their minds in creative problem solving. Finally, simulations allow us to train and practice skills and knowledge without the risks or costs involved with real life situations (e.g. flight or factory simulators). Thus the CE simulation game has an advantage against real on-the-job training. Due to error tolerance, trainees can make mistakes and experiments without actual risks. Enabling both individual and group learning, the simulation game will support exactly the learning needs of engineers, who on one hand have to work individually in their office and on the other hand co-operate with colleagues, customers and suppliers. TECHNICAL APPROACH Besides the didactic framework, which defines the game’s learning goals and curricula and which has to be derived from the above pedagogic approach, the development will be based on a second major starting point: The transformation of the partners’ expertise in CE into the definition of CE principles and processes and especially the development of a corresponding simulation model. This model will specify the logical reactions of the simulation game to the actions of the user. Further, it will define the events and conflict situations with which the user will be confronted when playing the game. It will be based on a conceptual model of the CE domain, which was developed at University of Nottingham and University of Bremen (Pawar, Thoben, Oehlmann, 1995). The simulation model will also define the reproduction of the reality into game symbols that have to be transformed into computer representations. This transformation has to melt with utmost perfection the didactic concept, the CE environment and the multimedia user interface into an attractive and ergonomic gaming environment. The faithful and attractive reproduction of the CE environment will be a key challenge and requires a careful development of the multimedia user interface. Further experiments will cover aspects for a realistic interaction with the simulated world when the game is played in the single user mode. Aspects are speech recognition for natural language interaction, simulative video conferencing with the computer as virtual communication partner, embedded animations for representing colleagues and events, as well as artificial life technology. (Cyberlife, 1997) To play the game in a group mode, several clients of the game can link into a network providing a common state of the simulated world. One of the game clients will take over a server role in order to trigger events for the overall co-ordination of the game. Nevertheless, the research and development for the group mode of the game is mainly concentrated on telecommunication aspects since the game will integrate

different types of communication tools from e-mail to video-conferencing (multimedia communication tool set). In order to develop a reusable solution, the CE model will be separated from the software module as shown in Figure 2. Thus, the content of the game can be easily exchanged and the software module can be used for training other domains by connecting it to other simulation models. Other potential applications in the area of production could be the education of negotiation skills for order acquisition, or training of distance maintenance for repair. Hence, a major task will be the selection, adaptation and application of a generic method, enabling the modelling of the game’s behaviour for different domains. A promising approach to be examined is the EXPRESS C modelling language (Staub, Nieva, Schonefeld, 1994) and its implementation, the ECCO tool kit. Simulation Model

CE Model Objects

Performance indicators

Roles

Documentation

Events

Scenarios

Model Interpreter

Multimedia User Interface Game Engine (Control Unit)

Multi User Interface

Multimedia Communication Tool Set Email Client Video-Conferencing

other Users / game clients

Communication Network Model

Data-Conferencing Other

Figure 2: Draft concept for a system architecture INTERORGANISATIONAL EDUCATION IN EUROPEAN NETWORKS Real training and education for Concurrent Engineering must take place at minimum on an European level. The coping with typical problems of multi-cultural and multilingual cooperation in daily work, as they are induced by current trends for globalisation and the Extended Enterprise (Browne, Jagdev, 1996), can only be learnt by interacting in such an environment. Also, with respect to the design of user interfaces for the game, different didactic and psychological perspectives have to be integrated in order to develop a solution of high applicability. Thus, it is essential that a cross

section of European experiences, examples, developments, scenarios and teaching methods are incorporated into the game. In return, this will provide a number of tangible and intangible benefits to the competitiveness of European industry. It will also enhance integration across European engineering education establishments. In order to get the full benefit of the CE simulation game, schools and universities providing CE training are required to build internal and cross-school electronic networks that allow trainees and students to participate in common learning experiences together with the other users of the CE simulation game. The same applies to the training of engineers whose organisations are asked to set-up inter organisational training networks. Special benefits can be expected from the melting of industrial and academic activities, i.e. the joint gaming of engineers and students who can stimulate each other by different ways of thinking and by different levels of experience with respect to CE and engineering work. The Concurrent Engineering Network of Excellence (CE-NET, ESPRIT project 25946) is an excellent environment for setting up such inter organisational education and training alliances. Objective of CE-NET is to provide an infrastructure to support the shaping of the Concurrent Enterprise and its long term goal is to support the creation and functioning of the Concurrent Enterprise trough training, education and technology transfer. RESEARCH QUESTIONS The planned development of the CE simulation game raises many questions in different areas like pedagogics, technology, contents, acceptance, etc. Many of them are research questions which can be only answered after methodical validation of the game in real usage situations. However, it is important to capture the current opinions, expectations and requirements of industry and academia in order to choose optimal parameters when starting the development. The below questions are intended to open a debate and stimulate the exchange of ideas. REQUIRED CONTENTS AND INDUSTRIAL USAGE SITUATION • Which learning goals are seen as most relevant by industry? What is the perspective of the management and what is the perspective of the engineers, do they have different ideas about the needed content? Is the industrial perspective different than the academic, shall students have different contents than engineers? • What roles are needed in the game and who represents them? Is it necessary to actively integrate other domains like marketing or controlling, or can these roles be simulated by the computer? • What are critical success factors for using the game? Which basic factors would hinder an individual or an organisation to make the tool an active part of its education or training activities? Will the game be so interesting and edutaining that it will be used during daily work by the engineers of their own free will? • Will organisations encourage their engineers to play the simulation game in a distributed environment with engineers from other companies or university students, or are there inter organisational borders that cannot be overcome? Do the compa-

nies fear to reveal ‘competitive advantages’ like employee’s special skills when they game with other organisations? PEDAGOGICAL EFFECTS • Do the lessons learned from simulation games transfer to real-life contexts as well as those learned with more traditional means? In spite of the great enthusiasm around computerised training tools, their efficiency, for example the nature and scope of transfer has not been properly studied. • What is the actual educational effect of the different media elements of multimedia? Multimedia is a fashionable educational tool, but what is the role of the different media involved in a multimedia empowered learning experience? • How does group learning conducted through information networks differ from faceto-face group learning? The training and education applications of information networks have become more and more important, but we do not properly understand the differences of face-to-face and face-to-network-to-face communication and learning situations. • Are the learning outcomes cost and time effective when compared to alternative training means? In order to be justifiable, new educational tools and methodologies have to be cost and time effective. • How will trainees from different cultures act and co-operate, when brought together on a shared simulation? A learning experience shared through a communication network differs greatly from traditional group learning situations – the people involved participate in the experience from within their own cultures. They do not have to travel into another culture in order to participate. Does this affect the outcomes? TECHNICAL ASPECTS • Which elements can represent a CE environment. How to go further from existing desktop representations in order to represent aspects like cooperation and communication in the user interface? • Which bandwidth is needed for gaming in a multimedia environment? High requirements like ATM would reduce the number of potential participants since these technologies are only available in some organisation • What is required of the management and upkeep of a simulation game and its informational and didactic content? Management and upkeep of the information and didactic content of computerised training and support tools have proven problematic and critical for their success (Vartiainen, Pulkkis, Kasvi, Nieminen, 1996). New perspectives and methodologies are required in order to avoid problems like responsibility gaps and low level of utilisation. CONCLUSION The authors aim to develop a multimedia simulation game for the education and training of European engineers and engineering students in Concurrent Engineering. Innovative information and communication technologies will be applied for preparing

engineers for their career in a product development environment characterised by globalisation and extensive use of computers. The objective is, to use a game to • turn the personal and common habit of work towards CE practice • learn how to co-operate and communicate effectively • create awareness about deficiencies of the as-is work situation • create awareness about the potentials of new ways, methods and tools related to CE • to learn about specific new ways, methods and tools related to CE. The paper has described the initial concepts for the simulation game and risen several research questions, which are to be answered in the future. The development aim was shown to be ambitious and what is needed for reaching the objectives is the incorporation of advanced information technology, including multimedia user interfaces for enabling users to interact with all senses, and telecommunication functions for distance gaming. This has to be accompanied by corresponding didactic concepts based on knowledge about the cognitive effects of computerised gaming. The intention of the paper was to stimulate a discussion about specific industrial and academic baseline requirements which have to be considered when starting the development work. REFERENCES Browne J, Jagdev H S: The Extended Enterprise - A Context for Product Development and Production. State of the Art Survey for the ICIMS NOE. 1996. Charney C.: Time-to-Market, Reducing Product Lead Time. Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Dearborn, Michigan, USA, 1991. CyberLife Technology Ltd., WWW-page, http://www.cyberlife.co.uk/home_page.htm, 1997. Ettlie J, Stoll H: Managing Design-Production Interface. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. HEI News, The Royal Academy of Engineering HEI News, 29 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 3LW, No 17, May 1997. Henning K, Staufenbiel J: Engineering Studies (in German). Staufenbiel Verlag, Köln, 1992. Hirsch B E, Thoben K-D, Hoheisel J: From Local to Globally Distributed Manufacturing: Consequences and Proposals for a Reorientation in the Education of Engineers. In: Krause, F.-L.; Shtub, A.; Shpitalni, M. (Eds.): CIEME. Israel-Germany Bi-National Conference on Computer Integrated Extended Manufacturing Enterprise. February 28-29, 1996, Dan Accadia Hotel, Herziliah, Israel.; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG; The Israeli Ministry of Science and the Arts MOSA; 1996. Kolb D A: Experiential learning: Experience as a source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs. 1984.

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