A design intent information model to support engineering design.

Redesign of products has grown in importance because of fast changes in the customer requirements, fierce competition between competing companies and globalisation of markets, among other reasons. Therefore, new tools and methods have been conceived for developing products in shorter times, with lower cost and with higher quality. Concurrent engineering aims at achieving these objectives by promoting the participation, during the development of a product, of experts from all aspects of the product life cycle. Thus, all the members of the team should share the information produced. One way to share information efficiently is through common information model structures. This thesis reports on the research into information models to support decisionmaking. It focuses on understanding the design history of the product, highlighting the capture and use of the Design Intent underlying the changes in a redesign. The research has explored information structures which can capture the changes done to the previous versions of the product, the Design Intent underlying those changes, and the known consequences of the changes, such that, the engineering designer can be supported in developing the next version of the product by having a tool that helps him or her to better understand the design history of the product. A new product information structure to support Design Intent has been defined which comprised four interrelated classes; a Configuration class, a Version class, a Characteristics class and a Views class. The information structure was tested with an experimental system developed using the ObjectStore 6.0 SP 8. This was used to implement the object-oriented structure while Visual C++ 6 was used to design the dialogs to interact with the database. The development history of a wire-straightening machine was used as the case study to explore the information structure. The result of this research is a novel product model structure that can work as a repository to capture and use information related to the Design Intent.