Intelligent life-oriented design solution space selection

Consideration of design specifications is a vital part of the product design process. When design specifications are met, not only is customer satisfaction increased, but product development times and costs are reduced through less iteration. Product quality is also likely to be higher if these specifications are systematically addressed. However, focusing on the functionality specifications of the product is not enough. For the product to be really successful, design engineers have to take into account the specifications for the whole product life cycle, not only those for the use phase. This means that fabrication and assembly specifications, product servicing, product retirement and other specifications of the product from conception to grave should also be taken into account. Traditional CAD tools tend to provide support for the solution phase of the design process, with the design specifications being overlooked. This is a major limitation of these tools given the vital importance of considering design specifications during the design process. Due to this, specifications management is still very paper-based and is kept separate from the actual solution generation as there is no way for the designer to know, via traditional CAD tools, whether a given specification is satisfied in the solution being developed unless it is manually checked each time the question arises. What engineering designers do in practice is they start off with reading the design specifications from the Product Design Specification (PDS), then move on to generate a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) chart to convert the customer ‘wants’ into technical specifications, then start to take decisions based on what has been stored in their memories from the PDS and QFD [Grech 2009]. Hence, in practice, it is quite difficult to trace whether the design solution satisfies the design specifications or not. [Excerpt]peer-reviewe