Distributed and Collaborative Product Design Concepts Evaluation by Using Heterogeneous Terminal Devices

It is common in engineering design practice for designers and engineers to evaluate design concepts to determine if the design solutions meet requirements. The common practice has been to use virtual models on visual display terminals and/or physical models to evaluate design concepts. The emerging heterogeneous terminal devices — including mobile terminal devices with miniature displays such as smartphones and tablet PCs — offer alternative ways of visualizing design concepts and of performing the evaluation tasks. In the work presented in this paper, we attempted to address the challenge of using handheld terminal devices with limited computational resources and miniature displays in design concepts evaluation. We propose a new distributed and collaborative product design concepts evaluation scheme in which the evaluation is performed based on virtual models and product data displayed on heterogeneous terminal devices, including handheld devices. This scheme consists of methods and mechanisms that help to sync the needs of the evaluation task at hand with the available computational resources and display specifications. A practical example is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed product design concept evaluation scheme and how it can be used in practice. The major contribution of the reported work was creation of novel high-level model pre-processing algorithmic procedures for adapting product models to meet the evaluation task requirements and terminal device resource constraints.

Assessing Multimedia Content Adaptation Techniques With a View to Using Heterogeneous Handheld Devices in Performing Product Development Tasks

This paper articulates the potentials and limitations of the existing techniques for adapting product information contents for transmission among heterogeneous terminal devices and networks. The principal aim of the work was to understand, through a literature survey and empirical investigations, the affordances of the existing content adaptation techniques with a view to using handheld devices in performing product development tasks. Specifically, we reviewed and analyzed a wide range of the existing and emerging content adaptation techniques. The review has both revealed the potentials and shortcomings of the prevailing content adaptation strategies, and also has raised several questions for further research. Among the main shortcomings include lack of suitable mechanisms for adapting some specific contents used in product development such as for adapting 3D product models in context; and the inability of the existing mechanisms to guarantee the synchronization of both the meaning and the context of the content among heterogeneous terminal devices whilst meeting both resource constraints and task requirements. We have also identified the characteristic features we expect an ideal content adaptation mechanism to encompass, and used them as the basis for assessing the extents to which the existing techniques meet the adaptation requirements in product development. A concept and a generic architecture for content adaptation in a product development environment have subsequently been proposed. Overall, the existing content adaptation solutions provide only a subset of the desirable functional features. What is needed is a comprehensive adaptation mechanism, which among other things, handles 3D models and other types of product data; guarantees the synchronization of both the context and the meaning of the information content; considers the constraints posed by the heterogeneity of terminal devices and networks, and which at the same time also takes into account the task requirements and the specific needs and preferences of the users (who in the context of the work reported in this paper are the designers and engineers).