Facilitating design learning through faceted classification of in-service information

The maintenance and service records collected and maintained by engineering companies are a useful resource for the ongoing support of products. Such records are typically semi-structured and contain key information such as a description of the issue and the product affected. It is suggested that further value can be realised from the collection of these records for indicating recurrent and systemic issues which may not have been apparent previously. This paper presents a faceted classification approach to organise the information collection that might enhance retrieval and also facilitate learning from in-service experiences. The faceted classification may help to expedite responses to urgent in-service issues as well as to allow for patterns and trends in the records to be analysed, either automatically using suitable data mining algorithms or by manually browsing the classification tree. The paper describes the application of the approach to aerospace in-service records, where the potential for knowledge discovery is demonstrated

Component-based records: a novel method to record transaction design work

The growing pressures from global competitive markets signal the inevitable challenge for companies to rapidly design and develop new successful products. To continually improve design quality and efficiency, companies must consider how to speed design processes, minimise human-errors, avoid unnecessary iterations, and sustain knowledge embedded in the design process. All of these issues strongly concern one topic: how to make and exploit records of design activities. Using process modelling ideas, this paper introduces a new method called component-based records, in place of traditional design reports. The proposed method records transaction elements of the actual design processes undertaken in a design episode, which aims to continually improve design quality and efficiency, reduce designers’ workload for routine tasks, and sustain competitiveness of companies

Application of faceted classification to in-service records

Information about the functional or operational performance of the product through life is useful in providing validation and updating of knowledge assumed at the design stage. The collection and exploitation of feedback from experience in service allows engineers to reassess and refine their original assumptions, and this new understanding in turn informs the next design cycle. Current feedback documentation of in-service occurrences (issues, requests, etc.) is found to be inconsistent, thus reducing the ability to reuse operational information for design improvements. We argue that enhanced information representation and organisation not only allows for improved retrieval in general but also provides a suitable basis for analysis and inference of design-induced issues from the information collection. The paper will discuss an approach to information organisation based on faceted classification to enhance retrieval and reuse of in-service information feedback