Abstract:
Competition and the associated challenges in the automotive industry are increasing.
Products are becoming more complex to satisfy growing needs of the consumers and
products need to be cheaper and produced quicker. The automotive industry is
responding to these challenges, by developing products within collaborative and
extended enterprises across diverse geographical location. New customer
requirements imply high frequency changes to the initial design requirements.
Current unstructured approaches are not robust to deal with the volume and
complexity of the nature of product changes in this environment. The aim of this
research is to develop two methodologies, one for requirements extraction
methodology (REXTRAM) and the second cost impact analysis methodology
(CIAM) within the automotive industry. The research was conducted in a
collaborative development environment between automotive Original Equipment
Manufacturers and Tier 1 Suppliers.
The thesis has proposed two novel methodologies. The first methodology
(REXTRAM) extracts relevant data from product design documents and industrial
domain experts. REXTRAM generates as output a repository of requirements,
design parameters and their constraints. The second methodology (CIAM) identifies
two types of changes (constraints changing on requirements and constraints changing
on design parameters). CIAM combines matrixes and business (cost and time)
driver rules to determine incurred (delta) cost of requirement changes. The matrixes
exhibit three types of relationships: requirements to requirements; requirements to
design parameters and design parameters to design parameters relationships.
Case study approach and independent expert are used to illustrate the application and
the capability of both methodologies. In this way this research proposes a tested and
validated set of methodologies for the extraction of relevant data and the cost impact
analysis of requirement changes and its challenges. The resultant methodologies
have widespread application in the context of complex mechanical designs. The
research also identifies future research directions in the relevant areas.