Decision data model in virtual product development

Abstract

Abstract Products and applications are getting more and more complex. Therefore, engineers in product development need to consider an increasing amount of information from different disciplines and sources. From this point of view product development is basically decision making. Product development has changed over time from a sequential to a concurrent or simultaneous process. Hence, information and decision support need to be available for engineers throughout the whole product life cycle. In the early stages of product development, decisions have a great potential to reduce time and cost. With each decision on the one hand the information about the product or application increases, but on the other hand the design space is restricted. At the beginning of a product development we therefore have the least knowledge and information about the application, but all opportunities open to realize its full potential. With each decision the degrees of freedom for following decisions decrease. Hence, it is important to support engineers in their decision-making during the product development process. In this paper an approach is proposed to support decision-makers, namely engineers, in the product development process. This is done by implementing a method for decision presentation and documentation in virtual product development based on a proposed decision data model. Validation of the implemented systematic approach is presented and applied in the context of a profile gasket from the Freudenberg Group. It’s application to engineering problems and the benefit for decision support is shown particularly for sealing technologies and is finally discussed.