MADEsmart: An Integrated Design Environment

Abstract

Abstract Technology is within reach today to significantly improve the design/build environment for large scale engineering efforts such as those undertaken by the aerospace industry and defense contractors. On large and possibly geographically distributed teams, strong task management and easy information distribution is required to minimize the time necessary to develop designs. Broadening the scope of design constraints to include producibility issues, particularly with respect to design optimization, can significantly improve the quality of the designs and reduce the number of times they must be adjusted. Further, the ability to automatically evaluate designs with respect to requirements documentation can contribute additional improvements in quality and reductions in rework. The MADEsmart1 distributed concurrent engineering environment addresses these needs by providing task coordination and easy access to needed information. It will also provide integration of a number of multidisciplinary tools for design optimization and the ability to automatically evaluate designs with respect to existing, textually specified, requirements.