DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF A TOOL TO ESTIMATE THE IMPACT OF DESIGN CHANGE

Engineering change can occur at all stages of the product development. It can take the form of change in the requirements, functions, component(s), iteration during detail design, or correction of errors discovered after delivery to the customer. Despite an increase in the understanding of changes there is still need to provide support for designers to manage changes across different stages of the design process. This paper presents and evaluates a tool to represent design process information and for using it to estimate the impact of change on different stages of the design process.