Quality Function Deployment Integration with Design Methodologies

Under the background of the economic globalization, customer requirements play an increasingly important role today in almost every industry. Achieving customer satisfaction becomes the key way for a company to win market shares in the intensive global competitions. In this thesis, a four phase QFD-oriented product design framework is proposed by integrating Quality Function Deployment (QFD) with 3 different design methodologies (Environment-Based Design, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Axiomatic Design), to systematically guide product design from the planning phase to the detail design phase, and to build the link between design variables in different phases, so that it is known how customer requirements are met during each development phase, and till the end, customer requirements and product characteristics are clearly linked together. Apart from the theoretical side, a web application design case study is presented to illustrate how this framework is applied. In the case study, customer requirements are successfully captured and mapped down to the detail design level

Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for a Department Utilizing Environment Based Design (EBD) Methodology

The research on KPIs has undergone substantial developments for the past few decades. Different users of KPIs often define the KPIs from different perspectives. Generally speaking, KPIs are quantifiable variables that indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of the performances of a product, a system, or personnel. Managers may use them to evaluate the performance of their team members in order to keep them on the right track; employees can use them to monitor his/her own performances and adjust accordingly; customers can use them to select their ideal products. This thesis focuses on developing KPIs for a department. Currently, the methodologies of developing KPIs for a department are very limited. The dominate methodologies in both the research and practical world are Business Scorecards and Six Sigma. Both of them define the performance measurements from a high business level instead of providing much technical know-hows. Also, neither of them has addressed on how to prioritize the performance measurements. This thesis work proposes a new framework to systematically develop KPIs for a department utilizing Environment-Based-Design (EBD) methodology by treating “Designing KPIs for a department” as a design problem. A case study of applying the proposed framework on an engineering department of an Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) project in the oil and gas industry is also included in this thesis

Requirements Modeling: from Natural Language to Conceptual Models Using Recursive Object Model (ROM) Analysis

Requirements elicitation and modeling are critical for the success of product development not only in software engineering but also in other engineering fields. Collecting the right requirements at each stage and transforming them into conceptual models are essential in delivering a successful product. In most cases, original requirements are represented by natural language in engineering. However, a key challenge faced by industries is to transform existing loosely structured legacy requirements document into the structured representations. This transformation process is extremely time-consuming and prone-to-error. Some efforts in research have been made to develop automatic or semi-automatic processes to bridge natural language and formal representation. Motivated by both the strong industrial need to automatically formalize natural language based requirements (NLR) and the research breakthrough in product requirements modeling, this present thesis proposes a new approach to transforming product requirements from their unrestricted natural language representation to structured conceptual models by using Recursive Object Model (ROM). The proposed approach includes the following three main aspects: 1) developing criteria for the completeness and necessity of design requirements corresponding to certain design stage, 2) developing a dynamic requirements elicitation approach to refine requirements, and 3) developing algorithms for transforming design requirements from natural language to conceptual models, such as Use Case Model by Universal Modeling Language (UML) and Function-Behavior-State (FBS) model. This presented research involves Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, in conjunction with question asking (QA) strategy and conceptual modeling algorithms. The significant tasks include defining the scope of the right requirements, automatically question asking to elicit requirements, formulating the transformation of requirements text into conceptual models, generating the rules for the conceptual modeling, developing algorithms based on the transformation rules, and finally automating the requirements modeling process through software prototypes. The research foundation of this thesis is the Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology which is derived from axiomatic theory of design modeling (ATDM). To bridge the gap between unrestricted natural language and formal conceptual models, an intermediate representation, ROM, is the core for representing the semantics of design requirements throughout the requirements evolution process

Approaches to Quantifying EEG Features for Design Protocol Analysis

Recently, physiological signals such as eye-tracking and gesture analysis, galvanic skin response (GSR), electrocardiograms (ECG) and electroencephalograms (EEG) have been used by design researchers to extract significant information to describe the conceptual design process. We study a set of video-based design protocols recorded on subjects performing design tasks on a sketchpad while having their EEG monitored. The conceptual design process is rich with information on how designer’s do design. Many methods exist to analyze the conceptual design process, the most popular one being concurrent verbal protocols. A recurring problem in design protocol analysis is to segment and code protocol data into logical and semantic units. This is usually a manual step and little work has been done on fully automated segmentation techniques. Also, verbal protocols are known to fail in some circumstances such as when dealing with creativity, insight (e.g. Aha! experience, gestalt), concurrent, nonverbalizable (e.g. facial recognition) and nonconscious processes. We propose different approaches to study the conceptual design process using electroencephalograms (EEG). More specifically, we use spatio-temporal and frequency domain features. Our research is based on machine learning techniques used on EEG signals (functional microstate analysis), source localization (LORETA) and on a novel method of segmentation for design protocols based on EEG features. Using these techniques, we measure mental effort, fatigue and concentration in the conceptual design process, in addition to creativity and insight/nonverbalizable processing. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of such approaches

A Requirement Ontology To Guide The Analysis Of System Life Cycle Processes

Economies prosper by designing, manufacturing, and servicing a variety of innovative products, for example airplanes, healthcare services, infrastructure development, and information technologies. Having the right competency (aka information processing skills) for designing, manufacturing, and servicing these products is necessary for economies to exploit new opportunities. These products have become more complex to design, manufacture and serve involving people with different education, language, and possibly globally distributed. In order to create these products, information processing skills have been put to the limits causing competitiveness problems. Detailed analysis has associated these problems to requirements. Requirements involve to process different kinds of information (e.g., texts, presentations, sketches, graphs, tables, drawings, engineering analysis, and managerial analysis) during system life cycle processes (i.e., from idea generation to retirement of a product); where at each stage, information has different content (e.g., aspect, medium, and format). Therefore, a root cause associated to requirements can be attributed to a lack of a common vocabulary to communicate this variety of information in the context of system life cycle processes. Theories and models have been employed as solution to solve this communication problem; however, current practice results suggest that a more effective solution is needed. As a result, this thesis employs an ontology as a means to solve the problem which is also an alternative and complement to theories and models. In general, a requirement ontology for system life cycle processes defines the core concepts and their relationships which combined define a common vocabulary in the context of requirements for system life cycle processes. A common vocabulary enables better communication and understanding among people as a core tool to support information processing skills. Hence, an ontology as a common vocabulary is the foundation to increase competitiveness to design, manufacture, and serve a variety of innovative products; which may lead to economies prosperity. More specifically, this thesis proposes a requirement ontology for system life cycle processes as a tool to be used to guide the analysis of these processes. Based on the fact that the ontology refers to the knowledge domain of design, guidance from a design theory (i.e., Environment-Based Design) was adopted to create the proposed ontology. Four related ontologies were created based on frequency analysis in this thesis, but the proposed core ontology contains a vocabulary of 50+2 concepts and 24 types of relationships. The proposed core ontology has been validated from different perspectives: 1) design theory (i.e., Environment-Based Design) compliance, 2) creation and evaluation from international standards (ISO 15288:2015 and ISO 29148:2011) and three European research efforts, and 3) retrospection from three case studies: a) Total Quality Management System Guideline Development Using Environment-Based Design for Area Development Planning, b) Designing the Right Framework for Healthcare Decision Support, and c) Integrating learning through design methodologies in aircraft design. This type of validation enables to speculate that the ontology can be generalized to the scope of requirements for different engineering endeavours. At the current stage of research, the proposed ontology is an information technology product that contributes to the actual knowledge base two major aspects: 1) a common vocabulary in the context of requirements for system lifecycle processes, and 2) a replicable ontology design process that can be extended to other domains of knowledge. The current stage of the proposed ontology shall be moved forward as future research. Two major venues for future research can be considered. First, expose the proposed ontology to potential users to improve the current stage of development of the ontology. Second, use the ontology as a tool to guide the analysis of system life cycle processes (e.g., ilities or specialty engineering). The current stage of the proposed ontology and future research venues shall improve communication and understanding among people as a core tool to support information processing skills for designing, manufacturing, and servicing a variety of innovative products