Special Issue of Intl J of Product Development (March 2014)

Website: http://www.inderscience.com/mapper.php?id=35&jid=145
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2014

Based on previous analysis, this special issue is dedicated to collect current cutting-edge research contributions of dynamic requirement management in the context of complex product development (CPD). It encompasses the whole requirement change management process, from requirement change elicitation, modeling, visualization to control. It will include but not limited to following topics:

• Need identification and requirement elicitation methods (interviewing, question-asking, QFD…) in CPD
• Big data analysis for requirement management in CPD
• Requirement change management in CPD
• Requirement change modeling (DSM, ROM…) in CPD
• Requirement change representation and visualization (DOORS, C-FAR…) in CPD
• Strategic and scenario planning in CPD
• Anticipatory design (TRIZ, anticipatory capacity…) in CPD
• Lean principle in change management
• Evolutionary product development

Background

The complexity of high-sophisticated product development (e.g. aircraft, automobile) leads to a rather long-lasting design lifecycle, during which customer’s needs, business initiatives and technological innovation might be significantly changed. The challenge of complex product development addresses the management of huge density of information implied in the design process. Among the large-scale product information, design requirements are the essential engineering means to systematically describe the needs to be addressed and to guide the design process [1, 2]. The solutions of a design problem largely depend on the proper identification and management of design requirements, due to the fact that a small gap of design problem description in the early stage can be largely amplified in the latter phases [3], where design requirements need to be updated iteratively throughout the design process. Therefore, dynamic requirement management becomes a critical issue in complex product development, for the purpose of resolving design complexity, improving company’s profits, and reducing design cost and time.

Current related literature can be roughly divided into three streams. The first stream focuses on requirements elicitation [4-6], which aims to systematically extract sufficient and necessary requirement at each state of design. The second stream refers to requirement modeling [7, 8], which aims to formalize, formulate and represent the elicited requirements. The third stream dedicates to requirement change control, which can be classified into two types: reactive control [9, 10] and proactive control [11-13].

References

[1]    A. Ericson, P. Müller, T. C. Larsson, and R. Stark, “Product-service systems–from customer needs to requirements in early development phases,” in Proceedings of the 1st CIRP industrial product-service systems (IPS2) conference, 2009.

[2]    G. Cascini, G. Fantoni, and F. Montagna, “Situating needs and requirements in the FBS framework,” Design Studies, vol. 34, pp. 636-662, 2013.

[3]    T. A. Nguyen and Y. Zeng, “A theoretical model of design creativitiy: nonlinear design dynamics and mental stress – creativity relation,” Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science, vol. 16, pp. 65-88, 2012.

[4]    B. El‐Haik, Quality function deployment: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.

[5]    R. Hubbard, C. N. Schroeder, and N. R. Mead, “An assessment of the relative efficiency of a facilitator-driven requirements collection process with respect to the conventional interview method,” in IEEE 4th International Conference on Requirements Engineering, 2000, pp. 178-186.

[6]    M. Wang and Y. Zeng, “Asking the right questions to elicit product requirements,” International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, vol. 22, pp. 283-298, 2009.

[7]    S. D. Eppinger, D. E. Whitney, R. P. Smith, and D. A. Gebala, “A model-based method for organizing tasks in product development,” Research in Engineering Design, vol. 6, pp. 1-13, 1994.

[8]    P. J. Clarkson, C. Simons, and C. Eckert, “Change and customization in complex engineering domains,” Research in Engineering Design, vol. 15, pp. 1-21, 2004.

[9]    B. Morkos, P. Shankar, and J. D. Summers, “Predicting requirement change propagation using higher order design structure matrices: an industry case study,” Journal of Engineering Design, vol. 23, pp. 905-926, 2012.

[10]  A. C. Ward, Lean product and process development: Lean Enterprise Institute, 2007.

[11]  U. Pillkahn, Using trends and scenarios as tools for strategy development: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

[12]  G. Cascini, “TRIZ-based anticipatory design of future products and processes,” Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science, vol. 16, pp. 29-63, 2012.

[13]  Y. Zeng, Environment-based design  (to appear). Berlin: Springer, 2014.

Deadlines for submission

Submission of Manuscripts: March 31, 2014
Completion of first-round review: May 31, 2014
First-round revised papers: August 31, 2014
Target of the second (last) round of reviews: October 31, 2014
Second-round revised papers: November 30, 2014
Final Versions Due: December 31, 2014

Guest Editors

Dr. Yong Zeng, PEng
Professor
Canada Research Chair in Design Science
Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Tel.: +1-514-848-2424 ext. 5801
Email: yong.zeng@concordia.ca

Dr. Gaetano Cascini
Associate Professor
Politecnico di Milano
Dipartimento di Meccanica
Tel: +39-2-2399-8463
Email: gaetano.cascini@polimi.it

Dr. Xiaoguang (Tony) Deng, Jr. Eng
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Tel.: +1-514-848-2424 ext. 7043
Email: xiaoguang.deng@concordia.ca

Notes

All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please go to Online Submissions of Papers. If you experience any problems submitting your paper online, please contact submissions@inderscience.com, describing the exact problem you experience. (Please include in your email the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the names of the Guest Editors).