Improved product, process and rationale representation and information organisation to support design learning

Many companies are moving from a product provision business model to a product-service model, where the producing company retains ownership of the product and supports it through life. In such a scenario it becomes possible to obtain a greater richness of information relating to product performance. However, in order for this information to be usefully deployed in improving design and manufacturing practices it is necessary to reconsider the means by which the design record is represented and organised such that linkages between the design record and the emergent outcomes as seen in service are explicit. In this manner, design episodes which continually lead to suboptimal or undesirable performance in service may be identified and remedial action taken. Current representation practices focus upon a generally topological or geometric depiction of product, structured according to the Bill of Materials, which is supported by primarily textual depictions of the process followed and rationale employed. Although an engineer may be able to retrieve and assimilate information contained within these representations, it is difficult to provide a unified view of a specific episode as distinct elements within these representations are not computer-interpretable and dependencies across the representations are not explicit. This paper proposes a method by which decomposed elements of the representations of product, process and rationale can be computationally identified and linked, thus providing a mechanism to accumulate evidence of outcomes in use regarding aspects of the design for prospective improved design learning.