Open discussion forum overview:
The open discussion session of the DBD Open Workshop provided a great opportunity for audience members to ask questions of the panelists. The panel members were extremely engaging and gave interesting responses to the questions posed. The discussion provided a unique opportunity to get the industry view on decision based design. An overview of the major questions posed and following discussions are outlined below.
What is the role of visualization in decision-making process?
- Useful in communication between engineers and management
- Critical to designers and the ability to envision concept of design
- Helpful in getting product to market quickly
- Helpful in getting acceptance of a design methodology
- Adds credibility to design
How do you evaluate the success of the design process itself?
- Use of comprehensive QFD to analyze individual processes in overall process
- Use of a review stage after product launch to evaluate the process
How do you account for safety issues in the design process?
- Use of six sigma
- Use of FMEA to analyze new designs for potential failure modes and take corrective action
- Placement of products with end-users in a test and evaluate environment
- Use of formal safety committee with engineers from legal department and engineers with prior experience in safety evaluation.
What is meant by the use of math-based design?
- Math based design relies on a calculation based system to produce an answer to a design question rather than heurisics or expert input
How do designers express preferences in making decisions?
- Instead of allowing designers to express preferences, try to build a "best decision" formulation into optimization packages
- Preferences are expressed based on what we know, i.e. mechanical and electrical engineer will have different preferences
- Use of customer contacts and QFD to establish what preferences should be
How do you validate the methods used in the design process?
- Use of marketplace and product life cycle
- If initial criteria for product were met, then the method is validated to some extent
- There is a need for academia to experiment with these methods and to attempt to validated one or more of the approaches to design
- Methods employed are those that people know, we need to learn the right methods on an academic level
How do you relate statistical based design methods to other design methods? Do you see the statistical based
methods as a black box approach to dbd or as incorporated in dbd?
- Statistical methods are extremely important in product design evaluation and robust manufacturing
- Use of statistics is important in considering the manufacturing stage earlier in the design process
- Statistical methods were primarily a business tool but they're becoming increasinly useful in design
How does the sequence of the decision making process affect the stability of the process?
- The sequence may not matter in many situations
- Sequencing is not really an option in design because all the attributes/criteria of a design must be considered in parallel
Instead of looking at design in a multiattribute sense, does industry ever look at design from the single
objective view to maximize profit? What are the problems or difficulties associated with this approach?
- Trying to maximize profit would be moving in the right direction but generating the cost model is too difficult
- A network could be developed to just maximize profit based on cost functions but an inherent difficulty would
lie in understanding the design results - The fact that information is not complete and that markets and technology are constantly changing makes this difficult to achieve
Other discussion topics included:
- The concept of satisfycing and its role in DBD
- The differences in design approaches at Ford, GM and Black & Decker
- The collaboration of industry and academia to improve design methods being used
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