Process Models in Design and Development
Read this article. It provides an overview of planning models. Pay particular attention to Figure 1 as it visually provides a global view of planning models. Then review Figures 2 -17 for more in-depth visual planning processes.
Introduction
Scope of the literature review
The body of relevant literature is expansive and incorporates a broad range of perspectives. As with any work based on review of a large and established research field, decisions were needed on what to include and how to organise it. In this case, the decisions were guided by the authors' previous research into complex design processes. This involved industry case studies, model and method development, literature study, and practitioner experience.
The following decisions were made regarding scope. First, because designing is intertwined with the other work that takes place in a development project, we contend that these processes should be understood together. Therefore, the scope includes both design processes and development processes. Second, for the purposes of this article, the term 'model' refers to any explicit representation of a perceived or envisaged DDP situation, or any approach specifically intended to express and/or analyse such representations. A model may be expressed graphically, mathematically, computationally, and/or in written form. Third, we focus on models pertinent to engineering design and development. Although related topics such as user-centered design and product-service systems design are not explicitly treated, a number of the models that we review are relevant to all design activity and thus may be of interest to researchers working on these topics. Fourth, the article only considers models that explicitly include design activity, excluding those that focus entirely on other processes within the design and development context, such as manufacturing. Fifth, it was decided to focus on explicit models of process and to not discuss in detail topics such as product models and parametric models, even though such models do have implications for the design and development process. Sixth, models focusing on specific design issues such as design for assembly are not emphasised, nor are models specific to particular companies. Finally, work on computational design and design optimisation processes is considered out-of-scope.
The article is an integrative overview in which an organising framework is explained and illustrated by discussion of selected key publications. Therefore, although the framework aims to provide comprehensive coverage of model categories and to indicate the relationships between them, the bibliography does not comprise a complete list of all model variants nor all relevant publications. Pointers to more exhaustive but more narrowly focused reviews are provided where such work is available. Finally, we note that many DDP models could be interpreted or applied in different ways, which can cause difficulties arriving at an unambiguous classification. In this article, we seek to keep our analysis as grounded as possible by restricting our attention to how each model is described in its key supporting publications, as listed in the bibliography.