Assessing Design Repository Search Effectiveness

Abstract

Reuse of design knowledge in systems engineering (SE) has been identified as a potential way to decrease design cycle times and development costs of engineering projects. Design repositories (DR) have been proposed and demonstrated as a way to store design knowledge in a reusable way. Yet little attention has been devoted specifically to the search methods used to identifying useful information within a DR, or how search method effectiveness can be measured or assessed. This paper demonstrates a method for assessing the effectiveness of search approaches within DR. The use of this method in assessing multiple search algorithms is demonstrated by example. The assessment method presented herein can also be used to identify the characteristics of repository data or intended reuse applications that affect the performance of search methods. These results can be used by engineers to inform selection of search methods based on anticipated future DR use cases.