Reusable Design Processes via Modular, Executable, Decision-Centric Templates

While there have been many advances with respect to reusability and scalability of product architectures over the past several decades, little progress has been made in applying the same concepts to underlying design processes. It is on this aspect of design process design that we focus in this paper. Design processes play a key role in product design and their configuration has a significant effect on both the efficiency and the effectiveness with which resources are committed. Design processes also directly influence the final design of the product under consideration. As such, more attention must be paid to the manner in which these processes are modeled so that they may be standardized, executed, analyzed, and stored, allowing for their leveraging across product lines and reducing product development times. Computer interpretability is a key consideration in making required adjustments as product considerations evolve and design requirements change from one product to the next. In this paper, we offer a fundamental step in this direction by presenting a method for modeling design processes as reusable process templates that can be captured, archived, analyzed and manipulated on a computer.