CERC Technical Report Series

Technical Memoranda

CERC-TM-90-001

Design Assessment Tool*

Daniel M. Nichols, CERC
Dr. Sumitra Reddy
December 1990

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This effort has been sponsored by Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under contract No. MDA972-88-C-0047 for DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering (DICE).

Concurrent Engineering Research Center
West Virginia Univeraisity
Drawer 2000, Morgantown WV 26505

* Appeared in the Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on CAD/CAM: Robotics and Factories of the Future, Vol. 1 pgs. 73 - 79.

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Design Assessment Tool*

Daniel M. Nichols and Dr. Sumitra Reddy

Concurrent Engineering Research Center
West Virginia University

Summary

This paper describes the implementation and use of a design assessment tool in the DICE (DARPAs Initiative in Concurrent Engineering) architecture. The internal structure of the tool and the user interface are described in detail along with a brief discussion of work planned for the future.

1 Introduction

Design assessment involves the ability to judge the quality of a design based on initial specifications such as customer requirements, safety regulations, and standards. Evaluating these criteria requires that they be known, and this information can come from the standards and guidelines adopted and constraints created by specific customer requirements. Assessment capabilities partly depend on the availability of domain specific tools to evaluate performance requirements.

Assessment, in the engineering domain, can concern only one part or a group of related parts that interests a designer. Assessment results come in the form of graphical and textual reports in response to assessments relating to that part or parts. This paper develops the idea of a design assessor into a tool that fits into the DICE architecture [4].