Analysis of Information Complexity During Product Development

Abstract

The product development process is a series of asynchronous process steps in which the geometry, the materials, and the manufacturing processes are defined to meet the performance and cost requirements. During the product design, information about a product is initially sparse and becomes more detailed as the process matures. In this paper, we apply a systems complexity analysis methodology to track the evolution of information complexity for several design process workflows. We used a frame-slot based model to store parametric design information, defined the size and link complexity measures for the design information and tracked the evolution of the knowledge-base complexity throughout the design process. Product design through injection molding is taken as an example to illustrate the utility of our approach and the static and dynamic aspects of the complexity of design information are analyzed.

Dynamic Evolution of Information Complexity for Analysis of Design and Development

“…(5). In this section, we investigate a relation between the active complexity, and the static and the dynamic complexity.…”

“…Suppose that we have an artifact represented with E number of elements. We denote the static complexity at the k-th step in the development sequence as k s C , which is given as follows (5) :…”

“…Namely, once a design is done, the overall structure, the size and dependency between attributes and elements, is determined (5) . Suppose that we have an artifact represented with E number of elements.…”

“…(1), (3) and (15)- (19). The size aspect of a system, such as the number of elements or variables, is directly related with the amount of information contained in the system (5) . The more elements are in a system, the greater is the size complexity (10) .…”

“…In other words, the design process is an asynchronous definition and/or integration of several elements, i.e. physical geometry, materials, manufacturing processes, assembly, and packaging that meet or exceed the requirement specifications (5) .…”