| Reuse of existing engineering designs has been considered as a natural way to reduce cost and improve quality in product development. However, due to lack of systematic approach to make a design reusable, reuse process remained opportunistic and full potential for successive reuse has not been exploited. Furthermore, very little has been done in practice to explore the benefits of reuse at low level of granularity in development process and make the process lean. In this research, a knowledge centric process framework has been developed to design components and their artifacts for reuse. This way, lean development process is achieved using simple concepts of seamless design information flow and design reusability.; In the proposed framework, the existing designs are singularized, generalized and parameterized along with their interdependencies and implementation rules. These generic artifacts along with implementation rules are reused for the next level of design. Furthermore, model-based development has been demonstrated as a backbone for lean process implementation by providing seamless flow of design artifacts from one stage to another and their successive reuse for next generation of product.; A cumulative value index based method has been devised for selections of most value-added product features within the given set of budgetary constraints. Warranty based risk cost has also been introduced in feature selection to panelize the changes and promote the reuse. With part correlation change logic and integer programming, this method has been demonstrated as a basis for policy based decision support system for feature selection.; Prevalent measures for design reuse are limited to the end items being used in final product. Therefore, a comprehensive reusability index has been developed as a measure of design reuse. This index is based on leverage in development cost, time and quality through all levels of reuse during development process. An optimization model has been developed to apply context based reuse policies such as quick return on investment, maximum return on investment, minimum warranty risk and minimum development cycle. |
