ESTABLISHMENT OF A FOUNDATION FOR PREDICTIVE DESIGN ANALYSIS WITHIN THE ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESS

Abstract- In today’s highly competitive market place it is of great importance for companies to deliver reliable products while decreasing the development time and costs. The time to market is a driving force for many companies, and throughout the engineering design process as well as the manufacturing process, the focus is on finding timesaving actions. However, the search for timesaving actions will most certainly result in a loss in product reliability if it is not combined with improved techniques and tools used by members of the engineering design team in order to maintain an acceptable level of reliability. One of the areas within engineering design that is adopting new techniques and methodologies is the design analysis activity that has conventionally been performed by specialists, but has to some extent shifted to also be performed, where applicable, by design engineers. Further, design analysis has traditionally been utilized as a verification tool at the latter engineering design phases and also for failure mode analysis with the objective to investigate failed designs or produce results about whether or not it will withstand applied loading conditions. Today both the research community and industry perceive the value added when design analysis is used in early engineering design phases to predict the performance of the product to be. Statistically planned and Stochastic (alternatively called in literatur