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Engineering design reviews, which take place at predetermined phases of the product development process, are fundamental elements for the evaluation and control of engineering activities. These meetings are also acknowledged as unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge generated during a design review is not as secondary as it may seem; key design decisions, design experiences, and associated rationale are frequently made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process itself, but little work has been undertaken about the detailed content of the meeting activity; it is argued that understanding the transactions that take place during a meeting is critical to building an effective knowledgeoriented recording strategy. To this effect, an extensive research program based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The work reported in this paper focuses on a set of tools and methods developed to characterize and analyze in depth the transactions observed during a number of case studies. The first methodology developed, the transcript coding scheme, uses an intelligent segmentation of meeting discourse transcriptions. The second approach, which bypasses the time consuming transcribing operation, is based on a meeting capture template developed to enable a meeting observer to record the transactions as the meeting takes place. A third method, the information mapping technique, has also been developed to interpret the case study data in terms of decisions, actions, rationale, and lessons learned, effectively generating qualitative measures of the information lost in the formal records of design reviews. Overall, the results generated by the set of tools presented in this paper have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of the contents of design reviews. The concluding remarks also discuss possible enhancements to the meeting analysis tools presented in this paper and future work aimed at the development of a computer supported capture software for design reviews.

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Abstract. A prototype results from the need to verify various qualities of the product at different stages of its development. In set-based design, multiplying prototypes is particularly critical to enable a broad exploration of the design space before committing to a solution. The exploration targets the choice of the best of all viable concepts on one hand but on the other hand also focuses on documenting them to better orient the search during the next attempts. This ultimately contributes to gradually improving the company's engineering knowledge. According to current aerospace industry practices and considering the set based development paradigm in Lean thinking, an approach to handle multiple prototypes information with Digital Mock-Up (DMU) technologies is forwarded in this paper. This approach postulates that prototyping and testing activities may be supported by a Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) solution with a special use of three key functionalities, namely: Product Data Management (PDM) and MPM instantiation, MPM links, and Configuration Management (CM). These aspects are essential when handling multiple prototyping sets along with their test results.

Global collaboration is now a key for enterprises to rapidly achieve their worldwide successes. During the rapid expansion of their business, many challenges are emerging, e.g., novice training, knowledge transferring, intellectual property (IP) protection. This paper presented an effective approach for gaining new knowledge in a design project through reverse engineering by using Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology. The case study used in this paper was designed to demonstrate how design knowledge can be assimilated by using the proposed approach. A graduate student, without any aerospace design knowledge and experience, was presented with a sentence extracted from a statement of work of a student capstone project in the aerospace engineering department of École Polytechnique de Montréal. Within a month, the graduate student designer was able to deliver a conceptual design solution including product life cycle analysis, with only public resources at his disposal. The results were then evaluated by experts in aerospace who have collectively overseen the project for many years, on how much knowledge the student had assimilated. A comparison, between the student designer and other novice designers from the project, was given thereafter. The assessment turns out promising and inspiring in terms of the knowledge assimilation for a novice within such a short time. In other words, the effectiveness of the presented approach has been validated. This is a feasible attempt to significantly shorten the time and minimize the efforts for novice training and knowledge transferring in education and industry, especially when a firm is expanding their global business.