Transforming Multidisciplinary Customer Requirements to Product Design Specifications

With the increasing of complexity of complex mechatronic products, it is necessary to involve multidis- ciplinary design teams, thus, the traditional customer requirements modeling for a single discipline team becomes difficult to be applied in a multidisciplinary team and project since team members with various disciplinary backgrounds may have different interpretations of the customers＇ requirements. A new synthesized multidisci- plinary customer requirements modeling method is pro- vided for obtaining and describing the common understanding of customer requirements （CRs） and more importantly transferring them into a detailed and accurate product design specifications （PDS） to interact with dif- ferent team members effectively. A case study of designing a high speed train verifies the rationality and feasibility of the proposed multidisciplinary requirement modeling method for complex mechatronic product development. This proposed research offersthe instruction to realize the customer-driven personalized customization of complex mechatronic product.

Design Change Model for Effective Scheduling Change Propagation Paths

Changes in requirements may result in the increasing of product development project cost and lead time, therefore, it is important to understand how require- ment changes propagate in the design of complex product systems and be able to select best options to guide design. Currently, a most approach for design change is lack of take the multi-disciplinary coupling relationships and the number of parameters into account integrally. A new design change model is presented to systematically analyze and search change propagation paths. Firstly, a PDS-Be- havior-Structure-based design change model is established to describe requirement changes causing the design change propagation in behavior and structure domains. Secondly, a multi-disciplinary oriented behavior matrix is utilized to support change propagation analysis of complex product systems, and the interaction relationships of the matrix elements are used to obtain an initial set of change paths. Finally, a rough set-based propagation space reducing tool is developed to assist in narrowing change propagation paths by computing the importance of the design change parameters. The proposed new design change model and its associated tools have been demonstrated by the scheduling change propagation paths of high speed train＇s bogie to show its feasibility and effectiveness. This model is not only supportive to response quickly to diversified market requirements, but also helpful to satisfy customer require- ments and reduce product development lead time. The proposed new design change model can be applied in a wide range of engineering systems design with improved efficiency.