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

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

3. 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.

4. Design Process

5. 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

6. 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

7. Forest of Information

8. Project Flowchart

9. test Schema
MySQL Database

10. 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

11. existing

12. use

13. use traffic controller

14. pairwise

15. morphchart

16. comparison

17. voting

18. Safe Beverage Container Case Study
As displayed in the project website

19. BikeE Case Study
As displayed in the project website

20. Needs to Concepts Rendering

21. Cornerstone Design Case Study
Cornerstone Design Chicago house user requirements

22. DPM Case Study
Power Drill Customer Needs

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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).

26. 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].

27. Obviously you don’t have Any Questions?