Impacts of Function-Related Research on Education and Industry

Function in engineering: Benchmarking representations and models

“…Therefore, this paper provides a justification and a proposed research direction for establishing a common benchmarking scheme for function representations that are developed and deployed throughout academia and practice with the ultimate goal of providing industry with practically usable functional modeling tools and concepts and a clear rationale for selecting a particular one. Despite decades of research into functional descriptions, research suggests industry has yet to incorporate functional modeling in practice in a systematic way, while still proclaiming a need to express product information beyond form (Eckert, 2013; Tomiyama et al, 2013; Arlitt et al, 2016). It should be noted that there are other representations that are similar, but are not directly associated with function modeling, that are used in industry such as p-diagrams (Telenko & Seepersad, 2010; Campean et al, 2013), block diagramming (Sturges et al, 1996; Braha & Maimon, 1998), or IDEF0 (Nagel et al, 2009; Buede & Miller, 2016).…”

Thoughts on benchmarking of function modeling: Why and how

“…Earlier work on function benchmarking was presented at the International Conference on Engineering Design in 2013 (Summers et al, 2013) and revisited in a companion paper of this Special Issue (Summers et al, 2017). Despite decades of research into function descriptions (Eastman, 1969; Freeman & Newell, 1971; Rodenacker, 1971; Collins et al, 1976; Sembugamoorthy & Chandrasekaran, 1986; Andreasen & Hein, 1987; Hubka & Eder, 1988; Ullman et al, 1988; Vescovi et al, 1993; Sasajima et al, 1995; Bracewell & Sharpe, 1996; Qian & Gero, 1996; Umeda et al, 1996; Goel, 1997; Kirschman & Fadel, 1998; Gero & Kannengiesser, 2002; Hirtz et al, 2002; Chandrasekaran, 2005; Albers et al, 2008; Erden et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2010; Linz, 2011; Sen et al, 2011; Srinivasan et al, 2012; Pahl et al, 2013; Schultz et al, 2014), industry has not appeared to have practiced function modeling while professing a need to express product information beyond form (Eckert, 2013; Arlitt et al, 2016). A possible reason contributing to industry's resistance might be that there is no canonical definition of function, with various approaches to function modeling being grounded in different conceptualizations.…”