A cooperative design model based on vertex-colored graph

In many industrial cooperative design systems, experts from different sub-systems propose one sub-solution or more. One sub-solution of a sub-system may be dependent on sub-solutions from other sub-systems. We need to describe dependencies between sub-solutions, choose one sub-solution from each sub-system respectively, and then combine them into an integrated solution of the system. Normally, we get many integrated solutions. The process of finding integrated solutions is called solving the Cooperative Design Integrated Solution Problem (CDIS Problem) in this paper. We propose a cooperative design model based on vertex-colored graph, which describes the CDIS Problem. In this model, CDIS Problem can be regarded as a problem of finding all simple vertex-colored sub-graphs. To solve the problem, we design a search algorithm by combining Bread-First-Search and trackback. Application of the algorithm to experimental graph data is presented. The results show that this algorithm runs effectively in practice.