Towards Diagram Understanding: A Pilot Study Measuring Cognitive Workload Through Eye-Tracking

We investigate model understanding, in particular , how the quality of the UML diagram layout impacts cognitive load. We hypothesize that this w ill have a significant impact on the structure and effectiveness of engineers’ communication. In previous work, we have studied task performance measurements and subjective assessments; here, we also investigate behavioral indicators such as fixation and pupillary dilation. We use such indicators to explore diagram understanding- and reading strategies and how such strategies are impacted, e.g. by diagram type and expertise level. In the pilot eye-tracking experiment run so far, we have only examined a small number of participants (n=4), so our results are preliminary in nature and do not afford far reaching conclusions. They do, however, corroborate findings from earlier experiments, for example, showing that layout quality indeed matters and improves understanding. Our results also give rise to a number of new hypotheses about diagram understanding strategies that we are investigating in an ongoing data acquisition campaign

The sustainable co-design of products and production systems

The challenges in designing products and production systems are becoming increasingly complex due to more changeable customer demands, frequent product updates, and the requirements for resource efficiency. Established design processes are often unable to readily accommodate these rapid changes. In addition, incremental benefits are often achieved through existing sustainable design approaches due to inability to fully assess the impacts of product design improvements and their associated implications within production facilities. This highlights the need for more integrated design processes that enable seamless co-development of products and production systems. This paper examines the current interrelation and interaction of these design processes from the resource efficiency viewpoint, proposes a novel sustainable ‘Co-Design’ model, and discusses the ecological benefits of co-designing future products and production systems

Using a Large Language Model to generate a Design Structure Matrix

The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is an established method used in dependency modelling, especially in the design of complex engineering systems. The generation of DSM is traditionally carried out through manual means and can involve interviewing experts to elicit critical system elements and the relationships between them. Such manual approaches can be time-consuming and costly. This paper presents a workflow that uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to support the generation of DSM and improve productivity. A prototype of the workflow was developed in this work and applied on a diesel engine DSM published previously. It was found that the prototype could reproduce 357 out of 462 DSM entries published (i.e. 77.3%), suggesting that the work can aid DSM generation. A no-code version of the prototype is made available online to support future research.Comment: 16 pages, 7 Figures, 6 Table

Development of a design performance measurement matrix for improving collaborative design during a design process

This is a research paper. Research presented in this paper aimed to investigate how to measure collaborative design performance and, in turn, improve the final design output during a design process, with a clear objective to develop a Design Performance Measurement (DPM) matrix to measure design project team member's design collaboration performance

Model određivanja konstrukcijskih parametara u timskom radu pomoću Petrijevih mreža

Razvoj kompleksnih proizvoda potrebno je softverski podržati kako bi informacije o proizvodu bile strukturirane, pohranjene i dostupne dizajnerima koji s njima rade. Te funkcije ostvarene su PLM sustavima, no pokazalo se da PLM sustavi ne podržavaju dinamičko praćenje tokova parametara i komunikacijske procese u razvoju proizvoda. U ovom radu potrebno je kreirati model upravljanja konstrukcijskim parametrima u timskom radu pomoću Petrijevih mreža. Prije analize parametara razmatranih konstrukcija, proučena je literatura te su sažete najbitnije činjenice trenutnog stanja istraživanja. Procesi koji su modelirani su proces konstruiranja samohodnog uređaja za čišćenje prirubnice i proces konstruiranja Scara manipulatora. Razmatrani složeni proizvodi konstruirani su u timskom radu od dva člana. Relacije između parametara prikazane su u DSM matrici te je proveden algoritam particioniranja kako bi se vidjelo koji se parametri određuju sekvencijalno, paralelno i iterativno. Kao alat za modeliranje procesa pomoću obojenih Petrijevih mreža odabran je CPN Tools. Navedene su osnovne značajke alata. Kreirani su modeli za upravljanje parametrima procesa konstruiranja razmatranih konstrukcija uz model procesa komunikacije. Simulacije procesa moguće je pratiti uz korisnikov odabir izvršenja tranzicija ili automatsk