Improving Overlapping Between Testing and Design in Engineering Product Development Processes

Abstract

Testing components, prototypes and products comprise essential, but time consuming activities throughout the product development process particularly for complex iteratively designed products. To reduce product development time, testing and design processes are often overlapped. A key research question is how this overlapping can be planned and managed to minimise risks and costs. The first part of this research study investigates how a case study company plans testing and design processes and how they manage these overlaps. The second part of the study proposes a significant modification to the existing process configuration for design and testing, which explicitly identifies virtual testing, that is an extension to Computer Aided Engineering which mirrors the testing process through product modelling and simulation, as a distinct and significant activity used to (a) enhance and (b) replace some physical tests. The analysis shows how virtual testing can mediate information flows between overlapping (re)design and physical tests. The effects of virtual testing to support overlap of test and (re)design is analysed for the development phases of diesel engine design at a case study company. We assess the costs and risks of overlaps and their amelioration through targeted virtual testing. Finally, using the analysis of the complex interactions between (re)design, physical and virtual testing, and the scope for replacing physical with virtual testing is examined.

Testing in the incremental design and development of complex products

“…This considered both descriptive and normative work as well as treatments of testing in design and development process models. Beginning with the reviews recently published in Tahera et al (2017) and Wynn and Clarkson (2018), the bibliographies of those articles were studied, relevant original sources were revisited and their bibliographies studied in turn. Google Scholar and Scopus were used to find additional relevant sources and key journals including Research in Engineering Design, Journal of Engineering Design, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management were considered.…”

“…From the point of view of testing, these process models are partial not only in the activities that they depict, but also in their structures which typically do not emphasise the relationships between design and testing. We argue that this is an important gap, because a number of researchers have reported that testing is a very significant cost factor in engineering design and development (Tahera et al 2017).…”

“…As suggested above, testing is not limited to the end of a development process, but is done on an ongoing basis and 1 3 overlaps with design activities throughout product development (Tahera et al 2017). This is particularly evident for products which are developed incrementally.…”

“…More recently, Tahera et al (2017) focuses on the overlapping of testing with downstream design activities. Expanding the well-known model of Krishnan et al (1997), they develop a simulation using the Applied Signposting Model (Wynn et al 2006) to investigate the optimal way to organise the overlapping.…”

“…Computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulations constitute virtual tests that are often used alongside physical tests of components, subsystems, and whole product prototypes. This concurrency accelerates product development (Tahera 2014) while also increasing confidence in test results (Thomke 1998). …”