Mapping customer needs to engineering characteristics: an aerospace perspective for conceptual design

Designing complex engineering systems, such as an aircraft or an aero-engine, is immensely challenging. Formal systems engineering practices are widely used in the aerospace industry throughout the overall design process to minimise the overall design effort, corrective re-work, and ultimately overall development and manufacturing costs. Incorporating the needs and requirements from customers and other stakeholders into the conceptual and early design process is vital for the success and viability of any development programme. This paper presents a formal methodology, the value-driven design (VDD) methodology that has been developed for collaborative and iterative use in the extended enterprise (EE) within the aerospace industry, and that has been applied using the concept design analysis (CODA) method to map captured customer needs into engineering characteristics and to model an overall 'design merit' metric to be used in design assessments, sensitivity analyses, and engineering design optimisation studies. Two different case studies with increasing complexity are presented to elucidate the application areas of the CODA method in the context of the VDD methodology for the EE within the aerospace sector.