Workload-based change propagation analysis in engineering design

Abstract

As engineering change is a significant activity in industry and uses a lot of engineering design capacity, the management of engineering changes has become a crucial discipline. Some methods and tools to support dealing with changes have been provided. From the perspective of the workload, our work extends the method of change management through incorporation of requirement-driven change propagation. The primary result of this work is the provision of a design support to find the optimal solution of design change by examining the workload of each change propagation path. In this article, two types of change relationships are illustrated: relationships between change requirements and components and relationships between components. A matrix-based approach and two types of change propagation pattern (AND and OR) are implemented to generate change propagation paths. The concept of workload transformation is applied to calculate the workload of each change component, and then the total workload of each change propagation path is calculated to achieve the optimal solution of design change. Based on the analysis results, the schemes of design change with high workload can be avoided and those with low workload can be implemented efficiently. To demonstrate how the developed method can be applied, a blowing and suction machine is taken into consideration. Finally, the method is initially discussed and evaluated.