Information Flow Between Tools Early in the Engineering Design Process Kate E. Nordland Advisor: Dr. Edward Hensel M.S. Thesis Presentation July 23, 2007 09-2030, Conference Room, Level 2. Department of Mechanical Engineering The Kate Gleason College of Engineering Rochester Institute of Technology

Agenda Overview Statement of work Literature Review Background Intro to Design Database Scripts Case Studies Conclusion Recommendations Questions

Definition of Engineering Design “Engineering design is a systematic, intelligent process in which designers generate, evaluate, and specify concepts for devices, systems, or processes whose form and function achieve clients’ objectives or users’ needs while satisfying a specified set of constraints.” C.L. Dym, A.M. Agogino, O. Eris, D.D. Frey, and L.J. Leifer. Engineering design thinking, teaching, and learning. Journal of Engineering Education, 94:103–119, 2005.

Design Process

Design Tools Affinity Diagram Brain Ball Brainstorming C-Sketch Method Function-Means Tree House of Quality Morphological Chart Objective Tree Method Pairwise Comparison Weighted Voting

FACETS Needs Assessment Concept Development Feasibility Assessment Engineering Analysis Tradeoff Assessment, Preliminary Design Synthesis Engineering Models DFx: Detailed Design Production Planning and Tooling Design Pilot Production Transition to Commercial Production Product Stewardship

Forest of Information

Project Flowchart

test Schema MySQL Database

Script Schema Connections Page name Passed in Passed out Tables accessed Tables always written to Tables some-times written to welcome nothing project search keyword existing project search term, project number branch number, project number branch, branchfamily use branch number leaf, leaffamily, branch leaf, leaffamily beta pairwise leaf, leaffamily, alpha alpha leaf, branch morphchart/ comparison leaf, branch, beta proposed beta voting leaf, branch, beta, gamma gamma

existing

use

use traffic controller

pairwise

morphchart

comparison

voting

Safe Beverage Container Case Study As displayed in the project website

BikeE Case Study As displayed in the project website

Needs to Concepts Rendering

Cornerstone Design Case Study Cornerstone Design Chicago house user requirements

DPM Case Study Power Drill Customer Needs

Conclusions Determined similar facets early in engineering design process. Identified common tools used in the early facets of the design process. Proposed a table structure to store information from identified tools. Implemented the table structure through a series of web-based scripts. Demonstrated several tools through case studies utilizing the web-based scripts. Evaluated the table structure and implementation. Recommended considerations for future work.

Additional Conclusions Connections between engineering specifications and design functions are not covered in current literature. This area should be investigated further. Implicit relationships were identified within the House of Quality that aren’t explicitly stated. This apparent inconsistency needs to be looked into.

Immediate Recommendations Implement into EDGE environment. Develop wiki-based user interface. Improve functionality for generating concepts by selecting a single function, having that selected function stay “on” and only displaying that functions’ concepts. Add ability to assign multiple parents to a leaf in the sorting view of use Display confirmation before deleting a leaf. Differentiate between display of implicit relationships and explicit relationships in comparison. Determine appropriate method of storing strength of relationship data (beta.data vs. gamma.data).

Future Recommendations Incorporate the ability to consolidate input from multiple tools Update comparison so cells can be edited to write relationships to beta. Develop a tool to allow a “chief engineer” style weighted importance ranking to be written to alpha. Display items in morphchart in rank order. Include links to concept generation or voting. Identify the customers for the project are and relate the importance of the customer need relative to the different end users. Offer ability to add images such as used in the c-sketch method. Create appropriate table(s) and user interface for metrics to add capability for quantifying data. Expand tools set to the additional 10 facets of EDGE. Make recommendations to the user based in information stored in the database. Evaluate the effectiveness of performing an analytical analysis on validity of pairwise comparison [25].

Obviously you don’t have Any Questions?