Analysis of Information Complexity During Product Development

The product development process is a series of asynchronous process steps in which the geometry, the materials, and the manufacturing processes are defined to meet the performance and cost requirements. During the product design, information about a product is initially sparse and becomes more detailed as the process matures. In this paper, we apply a systems complexity analysis methodology to track the evolution of information complexity for several design process workflows. We used a frame-slot based model to store parametric design information, defined the size and link complexity measures for the design information and tracked the evolution of the knowledge-base complexity throughout the design process. Product design through injection molding is taken as an example to illustrate the utility of our approach and the static and dynamic aspects of the complexity of design information are analyzed.