HEURISTICS FOR CHANGE PREDICTION
DS 36: Proceedings DESIGN 2006, the 9th International Design Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Year: 2006
Editor: Marjanovic, D.
Author: Keller, R.; Eckert, C.M.; Clarkson, P.J.
Section: DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Page(s): 873-880
Abstract
Effective change management is a key to successful design development. As products and parts of products change, others can be affected, leading to further - often unexpected and costly - changes. These knock-on effects can jeopardise the timely delivery of projects and carry therefore a great risk for the entire design process. Predicting change propagation is difficult as designers do not have the overview and hidden dependencies between components are overlooked. This paper introduces simple graph theoretical heuristics as a means to predict knock-on changes. The heuristics are validated on the basis of the existing change prediction method and real world product models.
Keywords: change prediction, design structure matrices, complexity measures