Gregory Huet

Making sense of engineering design review activities

Abstract Engineering design reviews, which take place at predetermined phases of the product development process, are fundamental elements for the evaluation and control of engineering activities. These meetings are also acknowledged as unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge generated during a design review is not as secondary as it may seem; key design decisions, design experiences, and associated rationale are frequently made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process itself, but little work has been undertaken about the detailed content of the meeting activity; it is argued that understanding the transactions that take place during a meeting is critical to building an effective knowledge-oriented recording strategy. To this effect, an extensive research program based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The work reported in this paper focuses on a set of tools and methods developed to characterize and analyze in depth the transactions observed during a number of case studies. The first methodology developed, the transcript coding scheme, uses an intelligent segmentation of meeting discourse transcriptions. The second approach, which bypasses the time consuming transcribing operation, is based on a meeting capture template developed to enable a meeting observer to record the transactions as the meeting takes place. A third method, the information mapping technique, has also been developed to interpret the case study data in terms of decisions, actions, rationale, and lessons learned, effectively generating qualitative measures of the information lost in the formal records of design reviews. Overall, the results generated by the set of tools presented in this paper have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of the contents of design reviews. The concluding remarks also discuss possible enhancements to the meeting analysis tools presented in this paper and future work aimed at the development of a computer supported capture software for design reviews.

Manufacturing Process Management: iterative synchronisation of engineering data with manufacturing realities

The principles of Concurrent Engineering (CE) have led to an early introduction of manufacturing decisions in the Product Development Process (PDP). Nevertheless, the integration along the product life cycle of computer tools to help engineers manage their tasks in the global market still suffers from a poor understanding of information requirements for the effective streamline of the design to production process. Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) is a strategy that supports formal communication between engineering and production in a virtual 3D environment. This paper outlines how MPM enables a real-time assessment of component manufacturability and a parallelisation of product design and manufacturing processes. The proposed scheme is dedicated to offer CE teams the answers to integrated change management issues through a digital collaborative environment. From a technological perspective, a MPM solution provides an intelligent bridge between the Computer-Aided Design/Product Data Management (CAD/PDM) and Enterprise Resource Planning/Manufacturing Execution System (ERP/MES) software with viable perspectives for complete Product Life cycle Management (PLM) packages and new Knowledge Management (KM) approaches.

Product decomposition using design structure matrix for intellectual property protection in supply chain outsourcing

In global recession, outsourcing becomes a question of survival for most executives who need to restore profitability and growth. One of the critical challenges faced by such decisions is the potential risk of leaking confidential information through shared suppliers and partners. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to decompose a product into several sub-components for mitigating the risk of Intellectual Property (IP) leakage caused by inferences in supply chains. A design structure matrix is employed to study the potential risk of IP leakage considering different types of interactions between product components. Based on such a matrix, a clustering algorithm is developed to decompose and allocate the product components regarding IP protection issue. This methodology can be considered as a decision support tool to help the manufacturer select a set of optimal suppliers while minimizing the information leakage risk and the manufacturing cost.

Knowledge Loss in Design Reviews

In a design project, a great deal of information about the aspects of the product being developed and the progress of the project is exchanged during meetings. However, reports which constitute the formal records of meetings are often limited in the extent to which they capture the information exchange. New recording and facilitation technologies for meetings are improving but further work is needed to enable the efficient capture of knowledge and experience from the discourse. The work reported in this paper is part of a project, carried out jointly with Airbus UK, exploring how design experience and rationale can be captured from the discourse of design reviews. In particular, this paper will present a methodology to evaluate the knowledge lost from the formal record of design reviews based on a comparison between transcripts and official minutes. The interpretation of the results is based on a unique information mapping technique. It provides the research team with an essential visual tool reflecting the loss of useful design knowledge for each design issue identified during the meeting. All findings are based on an industrial case study and a survey on the requirements of practicing engineers in leading aerospace companies.

Theoretical Foundations Supporting the Implementation of Complementary Information Structures Across the Life of a Product

This paper presents a formalization of the complementary information structures approach, which was originally derived from the practical implementation of a Manufacturing Process Management solution. The Environment-based Design methodology has been chosen to generalize the Manufacturing Process Management experience and the resulting theoretical foundations are then used to propose a complementary information framework between customer needs and product descriptions. The definition of the relationships between the structures is derived from the “customer job mapping” approach used in Outcome Driven Innovation marketing techniques.Copyright

Effective reverse engineering of qualitative design knowledge: A case study of aerospace pylon design

Global collaboration is now a key for enterprises to rapidly achieve their worldwide successes. During the rapid expansion of their business, many challenges are emerging, e.g., novice training, knowledge transferring, intellectual property (IP) protection. This paper presented an effective approach for gaining new knowledge in a design project through reverse engineering by using Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology. The case study used in this paper was designed to demonstrate how design knowledge can be assimilated by using the proposed approach. A graduate student, without any aerospace design knowledge and experience, was presented with a sentence extracted from a statement of work of a student capstone project in the aerospace engineering department of Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. Within a month, the graduate student designer was able to deliver a conceptual design solution including product life cycle analysis, with only public resources at his disposal. The results were then evaluated by experts in aerospace who have collectively overseen the project for many years, on how much knowledge the student had assimilated. A comparison, between the student designer and other novice designers from the project, was given thereafter. The assessment turns out promising and inspiring in terms of the knowledge assimilation for a novice within such a short time. In other words, the effectiveness of the presented approach has been validated. This is a feasible attempt to significantly shorten the time and minimize the efforts for novice training and knowledge transferring in education and industry, especially when a firm is expanding their global business.Copyright

Set-Based Prototyping with Digital Mock-Up Technologies

A prototype results from the need to verify various qualities of the product at different stages of its development. In set-based design, multiplying prototypes is particularly critical to enable a broad exploration of the design space before committing to a solution. The exploration targets the choice of the best of all viable concepts on one hand but on the other hand also focuses on documenting them to better orient the search during the next attempts. This ultimately contributes to gradually improving the company’s engineering knowledge. According to current aerospace industry practices and considering the set based development paradigm in Lean thinking, an approach to handle multiple prototypes information with Digital Mock-Up (DMU) technologies is forwarded in this paper. This approach postulates that prototyping and testing activities may be supported by a Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) solution with a special use of three key functionalities, namely: Product Data Management (PDM) and MPM instantiation, MPM links, and Configuration Management (CM). These aspects are essential when handling multiple prototyping sets along with their test results.