A Case Study of the Product Design Generator

A Product Design Generator is a web-based tool, developed for a specific product platform, for automatically creating all of the design artifacts and supporting information necessary for the design of a particular product. The PDG is modeled as a transformation function where a set of customer requirements is transformed into finished designs that will meet those requirements. Several methods have been presented for configuring and defining a product platform and are not reviewed here. Once the concept and embodiment have been selected, scaling, reconfiguration, artifact creation, and testing must occur to complete the design. Variants of the product platform are achieved by modifying the customer requirements. The development of the transformation function must account for the envelope of variation desired to encompass the range of product family members. The development of the PDG demonstrates how this is accomplished