Methods and tools for analysing and controlling design quality as- surance processes

The design quality assurance (QA) process impacts the engineering design performance in many aspects, such as in design process cycle time, rework cost, customer satisfaction, etc. Thereby it is necessary to develop systematic methods and tools for modelling, analysing and improving design QA processes. This report addresses three aspects of QA processes: a process representation approach; a DSM-based (Design Structure Matrix) process interaction analysis method; and an ontology driven software toolkit to provide semantics-based quality assurance services in defining, analysing, and controlling the QA processes for engineering design performance improvement. The approaches, tools and quality assurance services developed in this project have been applied to case studies of QA process management in the consumer electronics design.