Author supplied from the article: ABSTRACT Increasing global competition in manufacturing technology puts pressure on lead times for product design and production engineering. By the application of effective methods for systems engineering (engineering design), the development risks can be addressed in a structured manner to minimise chances of delay and guarantee timely market introduction. Concurrent design has proven to be effective in markets for high tech systems; the product and its manufacturing means are simultaneously developed starting at the product definition. Unfortunately, not many systems engineering methodologies do support development well in the early stage of the project where proof of concept is still under investigation. The number of practically applicable tools in this stage is even worse. Industry could use a systems engineering method that combines a structured risk approach, concurrent development, and especially enables application in the early stage of product and equipment design. The belief is that Axiomatic Design can provide with a solid foundation for this need. This paper proposes a ‘Constituent Roadmap of Product Design’, based on the axiomatic design methodology. It offers easy access to a broad range of users, experienced and inexperienced. First, it has the ability to evaluate if knowledge application to a design is relevant and complete. Secondly, it offers more detail within the satisfaction interval of the independence axiom. The constituent roadmap is based on recent work that discloses an analysis on information in axiomatic design. The analysis enables better differentiation on project progression in the conceptual stage of design. The constituent roadmap integrates axiomatic design and the methods that harmonise with it. Hence, it does not jeopardise the effectiveness of the methodology. An important feature is the check matrix, a low threshold interface that unlocks the methodology to a larger audience. (Source - PDF presented at ASME IMECE (International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition
from the article : To gain competitive power, product designs and their production means have become more and more complex over the past decennia. Product designers are faced with the increasingly difficult task to guarantee steady behavior of the systems they produce. This requires thorough understanding of the complex principles that determine the behavior of these products. It starts with notion how the many parts, of which the product design consists, are cross-linked with each other and their surroundings. If the design relations act predictable then the product design behaves predictable, and the functional requirements have high certainty of being satisfied. Axiomatic Design offers a number of ways to model the relations in a product design in order to improve its predictability. The ‘information content’ or ‘entropy’ of the design is indicative for the behavior of a system. The information content in Axiomatic Design is in the jurisdiction of the Information Axiom. This chapter investigates if information could be applied in a broader context; to bring the whole of methods in AD under a single heading. According to the definition of information by Shannon and Weaver, a broader application may be applied for Axiomatic Design. Along this path, an alternative framework of different kinds of information is decomposed that can be used to analyze progression in a product design. ‘Useful information,’ proportional to the ‘ignorance of the designer after application of all his knowledge,’ is decomposed into three kinds of information that are applied to graphically monitor the design process as it evolves.
