Department of Mechanical engineering
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Item A designer workbench with real-time capture and reuse of information on product evolution and rationale(ICED, 2005) Kota, SrinivasProduct Life Cycle Management promises management of all intellectual assets generated for all life cycle phases of a product [1]. This includes supporting capture and structure of information generated about an evolving product during the PD process [1]. Many structures for product information [3, 4, 5, 6] and rationale information [7, 8] have been suggested, and some turned into a tool, e.g. [7, 8]. However, a practical tool for automated capture and structure of product information including rationale information without interrupting the working of the designer, especially as a product evolves through the PD process, is yet to be developed. The framework reported here has been developed by analysing the proceedings from design experiments and literature to capture, segregate and store the information generated in product design without interrupting designer. The main features of the framework are implemented into the preliminary version of a software tool and evaluated for the ease of use and reuse for designers and re-designers (re-users of rationale). The main functions currently supported are: creation and modification of a three-dimensional assembly, exploring the details of a version tree and product structure, and, exploring the events via video/audio clips attached to the version tree.Item Use of dfe methodologies and tools - Major barriers and challenges(ICED, 2007) Kota, SrinivasProducts make substantial impact on environment. Product to waste mass generated through out the product lifecycle can be as high as 1:20. Design for Environment (DfE) is an approach to design where all the environmental impacts of a product are considered over the entire life cycle of a product. Early stages of product development are the key for this because if we know the environmental impacts of potential designs while designing, we can make changes to these designs then and there so as to reduce their environmental impacts [1, 2]. However, unlike cost and performance, use of environmental criteria and DfE is far from part of mainstream designing [3]. Most DfE tools are conceptual in nature, and there is very little adoption of these in industry. Methods like [4] are useful for specific phases of the lifecycle of a product. However, during product development there is a need to consider the whole lifecycle rather than a single phase of the productItem Product development platform for real-time capture and reuse of evolving product information(Inder Science, 2007-12) Kota, SrinivasProduct life cycle management promises management of all intellectual assets generated for all life cycle stages of a product. In engineering, over 75% of design activity comprises case-based design ? reuse of previous design knowledge to address a new design problem. This means that rationale capture and reuse are critical in design and redesign projects. The goal of this paper is to report empirical study of designing carried out to understand the needs and constraints for design rationale capture, and to detail the concept, implementation and preliminary evaluation of an unobtrusive, real-time design rationale capture framework.Item Development of a platform for supporting design for environment(ICED, 2007) Kota, SrinivasIndividual guidelines often exist for DfE but these are not integrated with design tools. There is no comprehensive method that can be useful for the whole life cycle of a product in various stages of its design. Few tools exist that could aid iterative changes to a design required in product development and there is a need for an integrated methodology and computational support for designers. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) [1] is arguably the most promising and scientifically defendable method for estimating environmental impacts of a product during its lifecycle [2]. Like DfE guidelines, LCA tools are not well integrated with design process and tools. Consequently, there is a need for an LCA tool integrated into the natural design process that can be applied to early as well as detailed design stagesItem Development of a method for estimating uncertainty in evaluation of environmental impacts during design(ICED, 2007-08) Kota, SrinivasLife Cycle Assessment (LCA) is currently the most promising and scientifically defendable technique for estimating environmental impacts of a product during its lifecycle. Currently, detailed LCA is critically dependent on high volumes of product specific data, time consuming, often unaffordable and used in the detailed stages of design. Current approximate LCA methods are either incomplete, inaccurate or require prior knowledge of what data is important. There is substantial uncertainty involved in the environmental impact calculations in LCA. Literature suggests that impact estimation results must be accompanied by an estimation of its uncertainty or imprecision, without which the decisions taken could be misleading. During development of a product, there is often a lack of accurate information about its structure, lifecycle stages, and related environmental impact information. As information about the product lifecycle continues to evolve during development, the assessment method should be such that it incorporates the different levels of abstraction about product information. A key result to be presented in this paper is a preliminary method developed using interval algebra and probabilistic theory taking product structure and lifecycle uncertainties into account. This method helps in estimating impact values of a product proposal in the earlier stages of design by providing an uncertainty value in terms of confidence on the result calculated, with the intention of supporting design decision makingItem A method for evaluation of product lifecycle alternatives under uncertainty(ICED, 2009) Kota, SrinivasIn each stage of product development, we need to take decisions, by evaluating multiple product alternatives based on multiple criteria. Classical evaluation methods like weighted objectives method assumes certainty about information available during product development. However, designers often must evaluate under uncertainty. Often the likely performance, cost or environmental impacts of a product proposal could be estimated only with certain confidence, which may vary from one proposal to another. In such situations, the classical approaches to evaluation can give misleading results. There is a need for a method that can aid in decision making by supporting quantitative comparison of alternatives to identify the most promising alternative, under uncertain information about the alternatives. A method called confidence weighted objectives method is developed to compare the whole life cycle of product proposals using multiple evaluation criteria under various levels of uncertainty with non crisp values. It estimates the overall worth of proposal and confidence on the estimate, enabling deferment of decision making when decisions cannot be made using current information available.