Axiomatic Design and the Concurrent Engineering Paradigm

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is an organisational arrangement that systematically employs a set of functional disciplines to integrate and simultaneously perform all the tasks that yields to a product satisfying a known list of customer needs. Its chief goals are to shorten the products’ time to market, increase their quality and performance, and reduce their overall life cycle costs, from conception through disposal. As for Axiomatic Design (AD), it was developed by N.P. Suh at the M.I.T., in the late 1970s, to be used as a systematic model for engineering education and practice. Its underlying hypothesis is that there exist fundamental principles that govern good design practice. Starting from such a simple reasoning, AD provides a general framework to assist in the decision making of any design process, offering a means to show in detail and to assess the existing interplay between the design goals and the tentative solutions at any time in the design process. This paper is an attempt to show how AD can be used to implement a dependable Concurrent Engineering environment.