SBIR Phase II: Ecosystem for Learning and Team Design

This Phase II project impacts the way engineering design is taught in design courses and contributes to the training of a strong workforce in areas related to science, technology and engineering. The Ecosystem is a software tool that automatically verifies designs against the requirements, to uncover oversights early in the process, but also fosters engineering judgement and creativity, allows for assessment of designs with less subjectivity, and facilitates smooth communication among team members. This results in productivity enhancements, higher quality designs and shorter time-to-market, but also in societal benefits (safer products, less risk of catastrophic accidents and more competitive design organizations). The target market consists of (1) educational institutions teaching engineering design, and (2) design companies striving to ensure compliance with the design specifications. The core innovation is three-fold. First, it consists of an e-design assessment engine that is being developed to a high degree of sophistication. Second, design repositories are investigated and developed for integration. Third, holistic (big data) analysis of design content and metadata is implemented. The project seeks to develop an innovative design decision (learning) support system addressing problems related to the high cost of design oversights. Such oversights can result in catastrophic failures, product recalls, or simply in budget or schedule over-runs (due to rework). The Ecosystem offers a flexible, yet systematic and generic, framework, for guiding designers through the design process, and for automatically assessing design activities, from each stage in the design process, against the product design specification (PDS). At the center of the Ecosystem is the e-design assessment engine, which decomposes the PDS, correlates the design activities against individual requirements, and provides real-time advisories in case of design oversights. The assessment engine automatically configures popular development tools for engineering design, determines relevant analyses, and interprets the outputs. The Ecosystem interfaces with these development tools, but does not replace. The Ecosystem can translate qualitative customer requirements into solid engineering requirements, and verify the relevance of the design content provided through seamless interfaces with industry databases. The Ecosystem improves designers' productivity through automation of many administrative tasks (e.g., generation of project reports). Despite the automation, the learning experience is not diminished. The Ecosystem prompts for, captures, and preserves the rationale for relevant engineering decisions. It also supports accredited, generic learning objectives for engineering design.