Advancing the state of the art in the modelling and simulation of information systems evaluation

It is widely accepted that Information Systems Evaluation (ISE) is a powerful and useful technique that can be used to assess IT/IS investments in an a-priori or a-posteriori sense. Traditional approaches to ISE have tended to centre upon financial and management accounting frameworks, seeking to reconcile tangible and intangible costs, benefits, risks and value factors. Such techniques, however, do not provide the IS researcher or practitioner with further insight or appreciation of any inherent and implicit inter-relationships, in the investment justification process. Thus, this paper outlines and discusses via a taxonomy and resulting classification, alternative and complementary approaches that can be applied to ISE from the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Operational Research (OR) and Management Science (MS). The paper subsequently concludes that such approaches can be potentially used by researchers and practitioners in the field, as a basis for carrying out further research in the field of applied ISE

A Multi-objective Design Approach to Include Material, Manufacturing and Assembly Costs in the Early Design Phase

AbstractConceptual design is a crucial activity in the product development process. The design freedom must consider a trade-off analysis among several aspects such as assembly, manufacturing, and costs. The goal of this approach is to define a multi-objective design approach for the determination of feasible design options. The approach is grounded on the concept of functional basis for the analysis of product modules and the theory of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach for the assessment of the best design option. A complex product (tool-holder carousel of a machine tool) is used as a case study to validate the approach

Investigation on Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods Application in Sustainable Product Design

Background: Integrating sustainability development' aspects in the design process is becoming, a growth area in companies. Consequently, sustainable product design has to consider the different aspects of sustainability throughout its life cycle phases in addition of other requirements. This integration is becoming more complicated due the difficulty of managing the constraints and alternatives related to the product and stakeholders needs. This study aims to highlights the most used Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools and methods used in sustainable product design process. Contribution: Product design process involves interesting decisional tasks such as the choice of materials, standard parts, technical solutions. Hence, the contribution of this work is to help designer to adopt relevant MCDM tools and methods that can be integrated to other tools to facilitate and to justify their decisional tasks. Method: Several methods have been affected to solve the problems related to this complexity such as MCDM. A literature review was conducted based on Siencedirect and GoogleScholar articles databases. After filtering more than 200 articles only 62 articles were considered to analyze the correlation between sustainable product design and MCDM. Results: Classified MCDM use according to the type of choices to achieve SPD goals. This paper allowed us to find matches between MCDM methods and SPD problem. The majority of case studies result show that a large portion of sustainable design methods, techniques, and tools are applied to the sustainable product’ along its different life cycle phases Conclusion: It is noticed that the use of MCDM methods are an important outcome in the sustainable product design process and deeply helps designers to make suitable choices. Also, several matches relating MCDM, other methods and sustainable product design sphere are discusse

Innovative product design conceptualization with oil-less two-stroke engine as a case study

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering.Innovative Product Design Conceptualization with Oil-Less Two-Stroke Engine as a Case Study Innovative product design is a creative process, involving extensive skills and knowledge, numerous stakeholders with often conflicting interests, and a variety of trade-off decisions. The multitude of different variables to be considered together with the complex nature of engineering design confronts designers with a difficult challenge. The objective of this thesis is to establish a methodology that will help to formalise and enhance innovative conceptual product design. To achieve this, an oil-less two-stroke engine concept has been taken as a case study in order to elaborate, demonstrate, and validate the proposed Innovative Conceptual Design framework. The methodology aims to yield design process insight and transparency, and embodies two major phases: the Pre-Development activities, including the identification of need and product definition, and the Conceptualization Loop, which comprises the determination of attributes, concept generation, concept evaluation, and concept decision. In this present research, the Determination of Critical Design Issues together with Early Empirical Design are identified as two essential aspects of successful conceptual design. Early detection of potential design problems is vital for making intelligent and rapid concept decisions before significant development resources are committed. This approach also allows critical design issues to be tackled first in order to avoid going down blind alleys, and helps to control risk and cost. The thesis presents the author’s view of conceptual design as involving a continuous focus on four major pillars of design, namely the Time Focus, the Innovation Focus, the Cost Focus, and the Simplicity Focus, the “TICS Focuses”. On the basis of this perception the discrete design activities during the entire design process aim to develop an innovative, inexpensive, and simple product that is introduced to the marketplace in a timely manner. This may require the designer to make a number of compromises, which can be facilitated by the early detection of design problems by means of Early Empirical Design. In essence, the suggested conceptual design framework supports design engineers in making issues and problems obvious in the early, least-costly phases of product development. This is the key to accelerating the overall design process and avoiding product failures

Eco-Design Improvement at the Conceptual Design Stage: Methodology and Applications

While quality tools are familiar to industries for the continuous improvement of products, the associated tools can be adopted to make significant contributions that address environmental concerns. This aligns eco-design with the product improvement process. This thesis proposes an eco-design improvement method, in which the eco-design tools are systematically integrated for the purpose of reducing environmental impacts. In this context, this work focuses on the adaptations of quality tools for supporting the generation of new eco-design concepts. The developed methodology consists of three major phases. The first phase is concerned with the development of a relational matrices model. This phase is intended to explicitly capture the information of an existing design via relational models. These models are based on the integration of quality function deployment (QFD) and functional analysis (FA). The QFD process requires mapping quality attributes and design attributes to identify the attributes’ relationships to the existing design. The integration approach used is based on developed relational matrices to capture the relationships among environmental requirements, engineering metrics, design functions and physical components. In addition, FA focuses on functional decomposition of a design to support the generation of design concepts. One important feature of this phase is to connect the environmental requirements to the design functions. The second phase is concerned with the generation of design concepts. In this phase, after identifying the functions that are responsible for reducing environmental impacts, a morphological chart is used to support the synthesis of new design concepts. The third phase considers environmental impact assessments and concept selection. In this phase, two methods are developed: Pugh chart and fuzzy assessment. The Pugh chart is intended to evaluate the newly generated concepts via the delegated engineering metrics. As well, fuzzy assessment is intended to capture the imprecise design information at the conceptual design stage. To address this research problem using fuzzy assessments, the trapezoidal fuzzy numbers are first applied to capture imprecise design information for each design concept. A decision guide is also proposed to suggest a course of action based on the results of fuzzy assessments. This phase is also concerned with ways to incorporate such imprecise information with eco-indicators for decision making. Finally, for the demonstration and validation, the proposed methodology is applied to three case examples. These examples are in two different contexts. The methodology is first applied to home appliances, which are a coffee maker and hair dryer. Then, the suggested methodology is extended to the forming processes, specifically, the diaphragm forming process (DFP). This application of the diaphragm process is demonstrated through the assessment of the energy consumption of the usage stage. The developed methodology illustrates potential reduction in energy consumption for the generated designs of the applied examples. The results show the applicability of the proposed methodology

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Architecture value mapping: using fuzzy cognitive maps as a reasoning mechanism for multi-criteria conceptual design evaluation

The conceptual design phase is the most critical phase in the systems engineering life cycle. The design concept chosen during this phase determines the structure and behavior of the system, and consequently, its ability to fulfill its intended function. A good conceptual design is the first step in the development of a successful artifact. However, decision-making during conceptual design is inherently challenging and often unreliable. The conceptual design phase is marked by an ambiguous and imprecise set of requirements, and ill-defined system boundaries. A lack of usable data for design evaluation makes the problem worse. In order to assess a system accurately, it is necessary to capture the relationships between its physical attributes and the stakeholders\u27 value objectives. This research presents a novel conceptual architecture evaluation approach that utilizes attribute-value networks, designated as \u27Architecture Value Maps\u27, to replicate the decision makers\u27 cogitative processes. Ambiguity in the system\u27s overall objectives is reduced hierarchically to reveal a network of criteria that range from the abstract value measures to the design-specific performance measures. A symbolic representation scheme, the 2-Tuple Linguistic Representation is used to integrate different types of information into a common computational format, and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps are utilized as the reasoning engine to quantitatively evaluate potential design concepts. A Linguistic Ordered Weighted Average aggregation operator is used to rank the final alternatives based on the decision makers\u27 risk preferences. The proposed methodology provides systems architects with the capability to exploit the interrelationships between a system\u27s design attributes and the value that stakeholders associate with these attributes, in order to design robust, flexible, and affordable systems --Abstract, page iii

Risk Mitigation and Monitoring Challenges in Software Organizations: A Morphological Analysis

Context: The present body of research on risk mitigation focuses mostly on sparse and dispersed research using various approaches during project development. Objectives: This paper's goals are to conceptualize and construct a morphological analysis (MA) framework, examine the literature that has already been published on these risks and how to mitigate them in software development, and identify research gaps that suggest areas for further study. Methods: Based on a survey of 102 works, we provide an MA framework. The MA framework, which is composed of five dimensions and 17 variants, identifies 33 distinct research gaps as the maximum number of potential areas for future study. The implications for future research are covered in the paper's conclusion. Risk reduction during the project development process is extremely beneficial for project managers at an organization in delivering high-quality goods on time and within budget. Results:  Based on a review of the literature, it was discovered that the development of software projects used a very low percentage of official risk mitigation and elimination methods. Research also revealed the significance of people-related risks in the risk mitigation process for the benefit of the organization. Some key research demonstrated experimentation, case studies, and empirical approaches for evaluation. Future work may include examining project managers' perceptions and knowledge of risk management. Managers of software development teams require greater risk-mitigation strategies. Conclusion: Scholars and researchers need to put more effort into developing quantitative and intelligent risk models. It is crucial to identify major risks so that they won't compromise the project's future success. In our future work, we can employ more models that are helpful for combining quantitative and intelligent risk models using various AI strategies to reduce hazards