Value Driven Design

The design and manufacture of highly complex products such as aircraft, aero-engines and satellites are considered successful if they meet a number of economic, performance and capability criteria. The needs and expectations of customers and various stakeholders have to be incorporated into the design cycle. The emerging field of value-driven design promotes a cultural shift in the engineering design process and promotes the idea of ‘design for value’ as a complementary solution to ‘design for performance’.

Technological advantages

• Applicable to new product design, new service design, and operation of existing products and services
• Robust, scalable, collaborative and traceable modelling framework
• Provides a single ‘design goodness’ metric for assessing different design solutions
• Enables ‘what-if’ scenarios, sensitivity analysis and design optimisation
• Component-based models can be used in product-level models (Figure 1)
• Collaboration and automation possibilities through web services technologies and workflow execution environments (Figure 2)

Technology roadmap

The development of maintenance and lifecycle costing models has beenn supported by:

• Innovate UK-funded Integrated Products and Services (IPAS) project
• EU-FP7-funded Collaborative and Robust Engineering using Simulation Capability Enabling Next Design Optimisation (CRESCENDO) project
• Clean Sky SAGE-funded Systems Modelling for Unit Cost, Maintenance Cost and Value project

Currently, we are collaborating with Rolls-Royce on developing abstract product systems cost under the Geometry Enabled Modelling in Integrated Design Systems (GEMinIDS) project.

Collaboration opportunity

Further national and international research collaboration opportunities through EPSRC and EU Horizon 2020 calls are sought. For PhD/EngD sponsorships current DTCs established at the University of Southampton provide excellent financial support by funding approximately 50 per cent of the project costs.

If you would like to know more please contact Dr MH Eres m.h.eres@soton.ac.uk