Engineering design management: An information structure approach

Abstract

It is characteristic of engineering design that precedence relationships among the constituent design tasks contain information flow conflicts. The existence of these conflicts with the lack of formal methods to manage them render the development cycle time unpredictable. This paper discusses a qualitative approach to engineering design management from an information structure perspective. The objective is to model, analyse and manage the interactions manifested by the information exchanges within the design process. We introduce the notion of Structural Sensitivity Analysis (SSA), which is devised based on two measures of information dependency among design tasks: Sensitivity and Variability. Those two measures of dependency enhance the classical design structure matrix method and allow for more complex analysis to be performed.