Title: The practical use of inconsistency information in engineering design tasks - first observations

Authors: Alfred Sadlauer; Markus Riedl-Ehrenleitner; Peter Hehenberger; Andreas Demuth; Alexander Egyed

Addresses: Institute of Mechatronic Design and Production, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria ' Institute of Software Systems Engineering, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria ' School of Engineering, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Austria ' Institute of Software Systems Engineering, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria ' Institute of Software Systems Engineering, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: Today's product development projects require collaboration across different engineering domains in order to be successful. For instance, a project may require software engineers to collaborate with electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Even though engineers of different domains focus on different parts of the system-under-development, these parts typically cannot work in isolation. Therefore, coordination among these engineers is necessary to ensure that the individual parts of a system work together well when combined. The lack of such coordination leads to inconsistencies and hence the inability to integrate individual parts of the system. Even though approaches for finding such inconsistencies have been developed, it has yet to be shown whether the presentation of inconsistencies is of actual value to engineers. In this paper, we present the results of a practical experiment that assessed the effects of the presence of inconsistent information during development. The results indicate that specific feedback about inconsistency (when performing changes) leads to better engineering results than merely presenting general information about system interconnections.

Keywords: design inconsistency; multi-domain collaboration; system inter-dependencies.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPLM.2017.085959

International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, 2017 Vol.10 No.2, pp.171 - 190

Received: 27 Dec 2016
Accepted: 08 May 2017
Published online: 18 Aug 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article