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Technology
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Introduction
Typical development projects for new products undergo many cycles of the "design-build-test-redesign-build-test" cycle. Under this approach, design decisions are made quickly based on experience and empirical data of designers and engineers to reach the 80% completion level relatively quickly. Then the pain sets in -- a great deal of time is lost discovering the mistakes and poor decisions made during the early design stage. Many things have to be re-done, which takes exponentially growing time and cost when compared to doing it right the first time. From this point on, the project is on an asymptotic curve, requiring a deep pocket and exponentially longer time to finish -- a result of the philosophy that commits designed products and systems to documentation and construction without the ability for a design team to collaborate and test logical design earlier in the process. Because of these conditions, companies spend an order of magnitude more money and time in developing and using their products than necessary. The world is full of products failing to deliver against the original cost and requirements because of this traditional "design-build-test-redesign" practice of developing new products and conducting development projects.
Axiomatic design (AD) enables the development of complex systems and products (software, hardware, machines, materials, organizations, and manufacturing) quickly and systematically without depending on expensive and extensive repetition of the "design-build-test-redesign-build-test" cycle until all the bugs are discovered. Axiomatic design provides trace-ability of design logic when changes are introduced during the development phase and throughout the lifecycle of the product. Axiomatic design has shortened the product development effort and cost by orders of magnitude. Axiomatic design also enhances the ability of designers and engineers to be innovative and facilitates team work. All these things are possible because axiomatic design, based on rational scientific principles that have been derived by observing successful design and development projects, offers a process to structure and organize the process of design. The basic concept has been applied in many companies and many development organizations.
Axiomatic design methods implement a process where engineers, designers and managers think functionally first, followed by the innovative creation of physical embodiment. Axiomatic design also provides a systematic way of satisfying many functional requirements (FRs) at the same time without introducing coupling of functions and creating integrated physical systems. Axiomatic design provides means of decomposing higher-level FRs and physical embodiments (called design parameters, DPs) until the creation of leaf-level FRs and DPs that can be implemented to construct the system according to the resulting design decision architecture.
Complexity theory -- a result of axiomatic design -- and axiomatic design also provide guidelines for robust design and long-life of products. It prevents engineers from working on non-existent "imaginary" problems. In addition, it also shows how a system with time-dependent combinatorial complexity may be converted into a system with time-dependent periodic complexity. This will prevent the system failure due to a creation of chaotic systems that need "rebooting" due to system failures.
Axiomatic design is a methodology that has been developed to aid industrial development and increase productivity. It works.
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