The use of non-intrusive user logging to capture engineering rationale, knowledge and intent during the product life cycle

Within the context of Life Cycle Engineering it is important that structured engineering information and knowledge are captured at all phases of the product life cycle for future reference. This is especially the case for long life cycle projects which see a large number of engineering decisions made at the early to mid-stages of a product's life cycle that are needed to inform engineering decisions later on in the process. A key aspect of technology management will be the capturing of knowledge through out the product life cycle. Numerous attempts have been made to apply knowledge capture techniques to formalise engineering decision rationale and processes; however, these tend to be associated with substantial overheads on the engineer and the company through cognitive process interruptions and additional costs/time. Indeed, when life cycle deadlines come closer these capturing techniques are abandoned due the need to produce a final solution. This paper describes work carried out for non-intrusively capturing and formalising product life cycle knowledge by demonstrating the automated capture of engineering processes/rationale using user logging via an immersive virtual reality system for cable harness design and assembly planning. Associated post-experimental analyses are described which demonstrate the formalisation of structured design processes and decision representations in the form of IDEF diagrams and structured engineering change information. Potential future research directions involving more thorough logging of users are also outlined

What\u27s in Design Rationale?

A few representations have been used for capturing design rationale. To understand their scope and adequacy, we need to know how to evaluate them. In this article, we develop a framework for evaluating the expressive adequacy of design rationale representations. This framework is built by progressively differentiating the elements of design rationale that, when made explicit, support an increasing number of the design tasks. Using this framework, we present and assess DRL (Decision Representation Language), a language for representing rationales that we believe is the most expressive of the existing representations. We also use the framework to assess the expressiveness of other design rationale representations and compare them to DRL. We conclude by pointing out the need for articulating other dimensions along which to evaluate design rationale representations

A Semantic Information Model for Capturing and Communicating Design Decisions

A semantic information model to improve reuse and communication of engineering design knowledge is presented in this paper. We consider design to be a process involving a sequence of decisions informed by the current state of information. As such, the information model developed is structured to reflect the conceptualizations of engineering design decisions with a particular emphasis on semantically capturing design rationale. Through the approach presented, knowledge reuse is achieved by communicating design rationale. A case study is presented to illustrate two key features of the approach: (1) seamless integration of separate modular domain ontologies and instance knowledge related to engineering design that are needed to support decision making and (2) the explicit documentation of design rationale through design decisions

Capturing design knowledge

A scheme is proposed to capture the design knowledge of a complex object including functional, structural, performance, and other constraints. Further, the proposed scheme is also capable of capturing the rationale behind the design of an object as a part of the overall design of the object. With this information, the design of an object can be treated as a case and stored with other designs in a case base. A person can then perform case-based reasoning by examining these designs. Methods of modifying object designs are also discussed. Finally, an overview of an approach to fault diagnosis using case-based reasoning is given

Feature-based rationale management system for supporting software architecture adaptation

Each software architecture design is the result of a broad set of design decisions and their justifications, that is, the design rationale. Capturing the design rationale is important for a variety of reasons such as enhancing communication, reuse and maintenance. Unfortunately, it appears that there is still a lack of appropriate methods and tools for effectively capturing and managing the architecture design rationale. In this paper we present a feature-based rationale management approach and the corresponding tool environment ArchiRationale for supporting software architecture adaptation. The approach takes as input an existing architecture and captures the design rationale for adapting the architecture for a given quality concern. For this we define a feature model that includes the possible set of architectural tactics to realize the quality concern. The presented approach captures the rationale for deciding on feature selections and for selecting the corresponding architecture design alternatives. ArchiRationale customizes and integrates the Eclipse plugin tools XFeature, ArchStudio and XQuery to provide tool support for capturing, storing and accessing the design rationale. We illustrate the approach for adapting a software architecture for fault tolerance. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company

Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

A model for documenting architectural decisions

A software architecture is the result of architectural design decisions. Documenting a software architecture should not only describe the final model, but also why the architecture looks as it does. During the software architecture design process, several decisions are made, which need to be captured and documented in a systematic way to prevent knowledge vaporization and high architecture’ costs of change. In this work, a model for capturing, documenting and recovering architectural design processes and their underlying design rationale is proposed. The design process is envisioned under an operational perspective, where design decisions are represented as sequences of operations. Besides, the model is extensible to manage several design products types from different domains and views, including aspects of architectural rationale. Complementary, the proposal provides a semi-automatic mechanism for generating architectural rationale documents based on the use of templates.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Capturing design process information and rationale to support knowledge-based design and analysis integration

Issued as final reportUnited States. Dept. of Commerc

DESIGN RATIONALE CAPTURING MODEL FOR USE DURING THE EMBODIMENT PHASE OF THE PRODUCT DESIGN

An analysis of a design rationale focusing on the embodiment design stage is presented through the characterization of information describing design problems, alternative solutions, arguments, explanations and decisions of designers. The characterization of the design questions resulted from empirical research. The findings have been used to describe in detail elements of a design rationale capturing model. The main attributes describe this model during the embodiment phase of the product design, possible relations between the design rationale elements and the definition rules

From voice to knowledge: A proposal for a voice annotation system to support collaborative engineering design processes

This paper describes a novel voice interaction mechanism for capturing and managing design knowledge within a collaborative Computer-Aided Design (CAD) environment. We present a software module for speech recognition that integrates with a CAD application to allow the automatic creation of textual annotations in a 3D model directly from voice data. Audio is transcribed automatically, resulting in a textual note that is searchable and available to other users via a Product Data Management (PDM) system, providing an intuitive mechanism to document modeling processes and design knowledge. The system consists of three functional blocks: (1) audio recording, (2) speech recognition, and (3) query management against a cloud-based service. In this paper, we justify the need for our system from a human-computer interaction standpoint and discuss the rationale of its design and implementation in the context of collaborative design communication. Finally, we discuss some application spaces that demonstrate the capability of voice annotations for capturing knowledge