A Multimedia Concept Database for Improved Life Cycle Design

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Bradley ◽  
Alice M. Agogino
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Multimedia Design ◽  
Information Base ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Life Cycle Design

Abstract The architecture of a multimedia conceptual design aid, the Concept Database, is presented. The goal of the Concept Database is to provide design teams with easy access to information about life cycle design issues for competing design concepts and access to relevant past designs. The architecture builds on our previous experience in developing the multimedia design archival system called Design SCRIBE (Structured Capture and Retrieval Information Base for Engineering Design.) Approaches to selectively retrieving descriptions of design concepts and past designs are summarized.

Comparative Evaluation of Engineering Design Concepts Based on Non-Linear Substructuring Analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 633 ◽  
pp. 15-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mladenko Kajtaz ◽  
Aleksandar Subic ◽  
Monir Takla
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Comparative Evaluation ◽  
Design Phase ◽  
Structural Behaviour ◽  
Element Analysis ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
Conceptual Design Phase ◽  
Non Linear

The paper presents a novel approach to comparative evaluation of engineering design concepts that exhibit non-linear structural behaviour under load. The developed method has extended the substructures technique in order to apply the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) method to complex non-linear structural problems in the conceptual design phase. As conventional FE models based on substructures allow only linear analysis, it was necessary in this research to introduce a new algorithm capable of linearizing non-linear structural problems with sufficient accuracy in order to enable comparative evaluation of design concepts relative to each other under the given constraints and loading conditions. A comparative study with respect to model size, efficiency, accuracy and confidence was performed to validate the developed method. Obtained results indicate significant improvement over more traditional approaches to applying FEA in the conceptual design phase. The improvements achieved using the developed method compared to the traditional FE based approach are superior by a factor of 2.7 in efficiency and by a factor of 4.5 in confidence while not sacrificing the optimality of the solutions.

scholarly journals Shared Leadership and Team Effectiveness: An Investigation of Whether and When in Engineering Design Teams

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiong Wu ◽  
Kathryn Cormican
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Shared Leadership ◽  
Team Effectiveness ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Project Managers ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Team Process ◽  
Project Life Cycle ◽  
Project Life

Shared leadership is lauded to be a performance-enhancing approach with applications in many management domains. It is conceptualized as a dynamic team process as it evolves over time. However, it is surprising to find that there are no studies that have examined its temporally relevant boundary conditions for the effectiveness of the team. Contributing to an advanced understanding of the mechanism of shared leadership in engineering design teams, this research aims to investigate whether shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness and when shared leadership is more likely to be effective. Using a field sample of 119 individuals in 26 engineering design teams from China and the technique of social network analysis, we found that, consistent with cognate studies, shared leadership is positively related to team effectiveness when measured in terms of team task performance and team viability. Moreover, by integrating the project life cycle as a moderator, this study is among the first to investigate the temporal factors, for the effectiveness of shared leadership. The result shows that the stage of the project life cycle moderates the positive shared leadership-team effectiveness relationship, such that this association is stronger at the early phase than at the later phase of the project. Overall, these findings offer insightful thoughts to scholars in the field of shared leadership and bring practical suggestions for project managers in business who seek to implement best practice in organizations toward high team effectiveness.

Studying on Chinese Engineering Design Service Modes

2014 ◽  
Vol 501-504 ◽  
pp. 2632-2637
Author(s):  
Guo Hua Lu ◽  
Bei Bei Zhang ◽  
Hu Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Management Philosophy ◽  
Life Cycle Design ◽  
The World ◽  
Innovation Ability ◽  
Efficient Information ◽  
Service Mode ◽  
Design Defects ◽  
World Trend

Based on analyzing the characteristics of engineering design enterprises, through investigating 30 Chinese design enterprises ,the present main engineering design service modes are summarized and analyzed, furthermore the backward management philosophy, lack of the efficient information feed back mechanism ,and no enough attention to the accumulation of knowledge are uncovered as the root causes of low innovation ability, the design defects, and extensive management in Chinese design enterprises. Under the great changes taking place in modern market environment, the Chinese engineering design enterprises are required to transform for complying with market demands and the world trend, so the life cycle design service mode is put up with the development strategies for the development of the engineering enterprises.

A framework for supporting multidisciplinary engineering design exploration and life-cycle design using underconstrained problem solving

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
XIU-TIAN YAN ◽  
HIROYUKI SAWADA
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Problem ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Design Approach ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Life Cycle Design ◽  
Algebraic Constraint

The problem investigated in this research is that engineering design decision making can be complicated and made difficult by highly coupled design parameters and the vast number of design parameters. This complication often hinders the full exploration of a design solution space in order to generate optimal design solution. These hindrances result in inferior or unfit design solutions generated for a given design problem due to a lack of understanding of both the problem and the solution space. This research introduces a computational framework of a new algebraic constraint-based design approach aimed at providing a deeper understanding of the design problem and enabling the designers to gain insights to the dynamic solution space and the problem. This will enable designers to make informed decisions based on the insights derived from parameter relationships extracted. This paper also describes an enhanced understanding of an engineering design process as a constraint centered design. It argues that with more effort and appreciation of the benefits derived from this constraint-based design approach, engineering design can be advanced significantly by first generating a more quantitative product design specification and then using these quantitative statements as the basis for constraint-based rigorous design. The approach has been investigated in the context of whole product life-cycle design and multidisciplinary design, aiming to derive a generic constraint-based design approach that can cope with life-cycle design and different engineering disciplines. A prototype system has been implemented based on a constraint-based system architecture. The paper gives details of the constraint-based design process through illustrating a worked real design example. The successful application of the approach in two highly coupled engineering design problems and the evaluation undertaken by a group of experienced designers show that the approach does provide the designers with insights for better exploration, enabled by the algebraic constraint solver. The approach thus provides a significant step towards fuller scale constraint-based scientific design.

A Document Analysis Method for Characterizing Design Team Performance

2003 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Dong ◽  
Andrew W. Hill ◽  
Alice M. Agogino
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Performance ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Semantic Coherence ◽  
Design Documentation ◽  
Design Documents ◽  
The Impact

The premise of this research is that the engineering design process is partially driven by achieving consensus and reconciling points of view among team members. Characterizing the quality of the design performance by measuring the coherence of the description of related design concepts and events in design documentation is examined. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was used to analyze design documentation written by self-managing, cross-functional engineering design teams. Computational measurements of document variance and textual coherence were applied to the teams’ design documents, presentation materials and e-mail communication. The levels of semantic coherence were correlated to assessments by faculty and product designers and engineers from industry of the design teams’ process and outcome quality. The results indicated a statistically significant positive correlation between design document coherence and design performance, especially for poorly performing teams. The impact of this research is to provide team managers (people who create teams and manage teams) or self-organizing teams (teams that focus on self-reflection and peer evaluation) computational tools that could be integrated with design information management technologies to assist them in the management of engineering design teams.

scholarly journals IDEA: AN INTEGRATED METHOD OF DECISION MAKING IN CONCEPTUAL DESIGN

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Masur ◽  
Filippo A. Salustri
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Integrated Design ◽  
Design Exploration ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Integrated Method ◽  
Software Interface ◽  
Source Program ◽  
Quality Design

The conceptual design process is one of the most important and confusing in engineering design. The Integrated Design Exploration and Analysis (IDEA) process was created to help improve conceptual design practices in the industry. An analysis of existing methods was conducted in order to identify weaknesses. The IDEA process, along with a supporting software interface, was developed to rectify these weaknesses. The interface was written in the open source program Compendium. Three multi-disciplinary case studies were conducted to validate the process. The use of IDEA led to more and higher quality design concepts.

Dynamic Taxonomies and Intelligent User-Centric Access to Complex Portal Information

2011 ◽  
pp. 264-269
Author(s):  
Giovanni M. Sacco
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Database Systems ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
User Needs ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
End User ◽  
Information Base ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
User Centric

One of the key requirements of portals is easy access to information, or findability according to Morville’s definition (Morville, 2002). After a decade of using traditional access paradigms, such as queries on structured database systems and information retrieval or search engines, the feeling that “search does not work” and “information is too hard to find is now reaching a consensus level. The problem is that traditional access paradigms are not suited to most search tasks, that are exploratory and imprecise in essence: the user needs to explore the information base, find relationships among concepts and think alternatives out in a guided way. New access paradigms supporting exploration are needed. Since the goal is end-user interactive access, a holistic approach in which modeling, interface and interaction issues are considered together, must be used and will be discussed in the following.

Life Cycle Design and Evaluation at Conceptual Design Stage Using Digraph and Matrix Approach

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. F. Wani
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Matrix Approach ◽  
System A ◽  
Conceptual Design Stage ◽  
Life Cycle Design ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
System Nodes ◽  
Digraph And Matrix Approach

In this paper, a procedure based on digraph and matrix approach is presented for carrying out life cycle design and evaluation of mechanical systems, at system conceptual design stage. Features which characterize life cycle aspects of the system are identified and are called attributes of life cycle of a the system. Consideration of these attributes and their interrelations are rudiment in design and evaluation of life cycle of the system. This is modeled in terms of life cycle Design (LCD) attributes digraph for the system. Nodes in the digraph represent attributes and their relations are represented by their edges. The digraph is represented by one-to-one matrix for development of life cycle design (LCD) expression, which is characteristics of the system. A variable life cycle design attributes permanent matrix is defined to develop VPF-d which is also useful in comparing two design concepts of the system. Life cycle design Index (LCD-I) is obtained from permanent of the matrix or from the LCD expression by substituting numerical values of the attributes and their interrelations. A higher value of the index implies good LCD of the system. The ideal value of LCD index (III) is also obtained from the matrix expression, which is useful in assessing the relative LCD, of the system alternatives. The procedure is useful in design and development of LCD of the system. A step by step procedure for evaluation of LCD index is also suggested and is illustrated by means of an example.

Impacts of Team Composition of Distance and On-Campus Students on the Conceptual Design Performance

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ang Liu ◽  
Stephen C.-Y. Lu
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Project Teams ◽  
Distributed Teams ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Team Design ◽  
Distribution Distance ◽  
Partially Distributed Teams

In light of the rapid development of distance education, the distributed project teams that consist of both distance and on-campus students are becoming increasingly popular in many engineering design courses. This study examines different types of distributed design teams in terms of their collective ideation effectiveness. Depending on the distribution scale, various design teams can be classified into three types: collocated, partially distributed, and fully distributed teams. Furthermore, depending on the distribution distance, the distributed teams can be further categorized into “far” and “near” distributed teams. In this study, we evaluate and compare the ideation effectiveness of 24 team design in terms of the metrics of quantity, variety, quality and novelty. The results indicate that, compared to the fully distributed teams, both collocated and partially distributed teams demonstrate better ideation performance but in different metrics. The “far” distributed teams have a significantly better performance than the “near” distributed teams in terms of variety.

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