19. A Business Decision Support System Supporting Early Stage Composites Part Design

In the concept design stage for composites parts, there can be an overwhelming amount of options available to the development team in terms of materials, material design, processing/manufacturing and part design. In order to decide on any of the combinations of options to pursue, a Business Decision Support System (BDSS) supporting this decision process is key in order to select and evaluate options and obtaining an overall assessment of the design in the concept stage. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for a composite part can be a combination of technical, financial and environmental indicators, each requiring data from different actors within an organization, and are tracked in a dashboard throughout the part development. Within the COMPOSELECTOR platform, the business decision process for the composite part is structured and defined using the industry standard BPMN. This business decision layer links to databases and simulation and modeling applications, which are activated to generate data needed for the evaluation of the KPIs and which will populate the dashboard. The development and use of the business layer will be showcased for a composite part design which has technical KPIs requiring simulations to be run, as well as financial KPIs like part costs which are obtained through running cost modeling apps. The business decision support system and its business decision layer can be structured and run to reflect the existing decision process with all its actors within an organization or across the value chain, also including analysis based on optimization and uncertainty quantification.