Browse Theses

Recent proposals to support design documentation, especially in the area of design rationale, have not addressed the first-order needs of engineer, i.e., to produce a consistent and complete document able to explain the design at low cost to the designer. History-based rationale, argumentation-based rationale and device model-based rationale approaches fail to satisfy the documentation needs. They add to the cost of documentation, often do little to improve its consistency, and add nothing about its completeness.

Design documents are intended to support communication between designers and documentation users. However, automatic documentation systems do little to support the needs of the communication process: to reveal design assumptions, to provide a consistent explanation of the design, to maintain consistency between the explanation and the design, and to provide feedback on changes in specification.

This research proposes an approach for an active design documentation (ADD) that generates a dynamic document. This approach has been developed and tested for preliminary routine design, specifically for the preliminary design of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. The active design document is based on an underlying model of the design that was derived from field studies observing designers developing cases and documentation users reviewing design documents for understanding the design.

The thesis shows how the ADD approach to documentation provides a consistent and complete document that explains designs with low overhead for creating the document and for retrieving the document.

In addition, this research proposes a method for creating active design documents. The method consists of: (1) selecting a domain, (2) carrying out field studies to check whether the method is applicable, (3) developing the parametric model and engineering decision-making model for the design task, (4) building the design model, and (5) implementing an active design document system.

This method was used to create an active design document for the HVAC system design domain. A software prototype was implemented in KEE on a SUN Sparcstation to test the acquisition and delivery of rationale with domain experts.