NEXT-PLAN
Conservation and Reuse of Engineering Project Information.
(Next-Plan is an outgrowth of the
Generation and Conservation of Design Knowledge (GCDK) Project).
Contents
Projects are the primary mechanisms by which Engineers gain their
experiences and acquire knowledge; however, for several reasons one of which
is the added time it takes Engineers to record these experiences, only a small
fraction of this knowledge is recorded in conventional corporate documents.
This results in a situation where most projects that are canceled and
restarted have to begin from scratch and consequently take much longer to
accomplish. The goal here is to significantly reduce both these times while
maintaining or improving the product performance rating. Since most devices
on the market are produced and refined in a succession of engineering projects, this goal will be of particular value to organizations continuously faced with intense competition.
In the initial approach, design was posed as a question driven process. The conventional corporate documents and more informal engineer's notes were
reproduced in the vmacs electronic design notebook and indexed using a question-based vocabulary. A model of the product was then used to augment the retrieval heuristics. Finally, the corporate scenario was role-played to try out new social behaviors needed to adjust to this question view of
design. In this way the design disciplines of drama and knowledge based systems were brought to bear on a problem experienced by engineering teams in industry. Figure 1 shows preliminary results of this work. The documentation
system developed, DEDAL, was useful in reducing by about 30 percent, the time
it takes an engineering design team to work on the proposal for a restarted
project. However the time to index the documents and build the model increased the document preparation time. The current focus is therefore to reduce this time. To this end the engineer's plans in the form of pert charts and gannt
charts appear to provide the necessary leverage.
Figure 1: Effect of Document Type Transfered on Performance Factors.
The intent is to link the documents via the indices and product model
to the Engineer's plan. Then to use the plan as the primary document of
information transfer between projects. Preliminary observations show that
given the right planning tool, the product model is naturally constructed by
the Engineer in the course of his work. What we are then eager to see are the effects of this form of transfer on the measures of effectiveness defined above as well as the required changes in the Engineer's behavior, given the
increased emphasis on his planning documents.
Ade Mabogunje