Conceptual design phase Is partially supported by product Iifecycie management/computer-aided design (PLM/CAD) systems causing discontinuity of the design Information flow: customer needs -functional requirements -key characteristics -design parameters (DPs) -geometric DPs. Aiming to address this Issue, It is proposed a knowledge-based approach is proposed to Integrate quality function deployment, failure mode and effects analysis, and axiomatic design Into a commercial PLM/CAD system. A case study, main subject of this article, was carried out to validate the proposed process, to evaluate, by a pilot development, how the commercial PLM/CAD modules and application programming Interface could support the information flow, and based on the pilot scheme results to propose a full development framework.

Commercial computer-aided design systems support the geometric definition of product, but they lack utilities to support initial design stages. Typical tasks such as customer need capture, functional requirement formalization, or design parameter definition are conducted in applications that, for instance, support "quality function deployment" and "failure modes and effects analysis" techniques. Such applications are noninteroperable with the computer-aided design systems, leading to discontinuous design information flows. This study addresses this issue and proposes a method to enhance the integration of design information generated in the early design stages into a commercial computer-aided design system. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach adopted, a prototype application was developed and two case studies were executed.

The design process comprises the Conceptual Phase, the Embodiment Phase and the Detail Design Phase in which commercial PLM/CAD systems mainly support the latter ones. This situation causes the discontinuity in the overall design information flow: Customer Needs (CNs) - Functional Requirements (FRs) – Design Parameters (DPs) – Key Characteristics (KCs) – Geometric Parameters (GPs). There is also a lack of knowledge reuse in routine design process, resulting in large cost-waste of the overall design process. Aiming to enhance the continuity of the design information flow and facilitate the knowledge reuse, this paper makes use of a knowledge-based framework to integrate conceptual design tools: Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Axiomatic Design (AD), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and the MOKA methodology into CATIA v5 system. A knowledge-based application (KBA) on the large aircraft y-bolt component design is presented as a case study to validate the proposed framework. The result shows how this novel integrated framework and KBA system could benefit designers in a practical way.

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