Product Development Process Architecture of Diverse Engineering Systems — An Empirical Study
Year: 2009
Editor: Chakrabarti, A.
Author: Shaja.A. S; Sudhakar. K
Section: Design Theory and Research Methodology
Page(s): 527-534
Abstract
Engineering design process is used by engineers to develop products and comprises of enormous number of interdependent tasks. Literature shows that understanding the interaction of tasks is important to improve the design process which in turn impacts the success of the product. In this paper we consider task interdependency dimension (Product Development Process Architecture) of diverse engineering systems. The last few years have seen new research interest in the study of complex system architectures, like social networks, biological systems, etc. Seminal works covering each of these systems have appeared in high impact journals like Nature,Science, etc. Unifying principles have helped in gaining new understanding or extending the understanding gained in one domain to another. This paper is inspired by these developments. We consider a variety of product development systems ranging from vehicle design, construction, software, aircraft engine etc. We show that the considered systems are small-worlds. We determine motifs for each of the considered system and investigate whether these systems share any motifs across each other.We calculate some centrality metrics for the considered systems
Keywords: Product Development Process Architecture, Motifs, Small World, Metrics