Mapping customer needs to engineering characteristics: an aerospace perspective for conceptual design

Abstract

Designing complex engineering systems, such as an aircraft or an aero-engine, is immensely challenging. Formal systems engineering practices are widely used in the aerospace industry throughout the overall design process to minimise the overall design effort, corrective re-work, and ultimately overall development and manufacturing costs. Incorporating the needs and requirements from customers and other stakeholders into the conceptual and early design process is vital for the success and viability of any development programme. This paper presents a formal methodology, the value-driven design (VDD) methodology that has been developed for collaborative and iterative use in the extended enterprise (EE) within the aerospace industry, and that has been applied using the concept design analysis (CODA) method to map captured customer needs into engineering characteristics and to model an overall 'design merit' metric to be used in design assessments, sensitivity analyses, and engineering design optimisation studies. Two different case studies with increasing complexity are presented to elucidate the application areas of the CODA method in the context of the VDD methodology for the EE within the aerospace sector.

Visual Analytics for Evaluation of Value Impact in Engineering Design

“…The influence of colors in visualizing results have been applied on the area of Value Driven Design previously [16]. It has further been demonstrated the effect of contextual information of product oriented data and observed the effect on engineering team attention to how data was visualized [14]. The ability to interact with alternatives and changes conditions, such as product requirements changes and/or preference changes are clearly emphasized.…”

Value modelling for multi-stakeholder and multi-objective optimisation in engineering design

“…Thus, as Keeney (1996) advocates, the alternative-focused process of selecting the best from what is readily available, is converted to a value-focused process of identifying needs, attributes and values of these attributes that give the user a 'neutral' response, a 50% satisfaction level, described by Eres et al (2014) in the Concept Design Analysis (CODA) methodology. The major advantage of this value model is that it is an efficient and operational way to evaluate each design point with minimum interaction with the stakeholder during the conceptual phase, when only basic needs and vague requirements are known and the design is not finalized.…”

Model-Driven Decision Arena: An Aerospace Case Study

“…This is based on a list of 20 specific value drivers for the solution originating from the VCS description. While MCDA can be conducted with a variety of tools, for well-specified technology platforms (such as the TRS), approaches such as the CODA (Eres et al, 2014) and EVOKE (Bertoni et al, 2016) can be adopted. They are designed to reduce personal biases in the MCDA exercise and to better approximate customers' and stakeholders' satisfaction at varying technology attributes, thanks to the use of non-linear value functions.…”