The Digital Footprint of Engineering Design Projects: Sensors for Project Health Monitoring

When compared to the practices of 1950 the engineering design process has undergone a transformative change. In particular, the scale of engineering projects is an order of magnitude greater, the complexity of the artefacts being designed has increased dramatically, and the toolchains employed are almost all digital and far more advanced in terms of analytical capability than classical techniques used in the 50s. For example, the design of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner involved more than 153,000 employees in 70 countries, R&D in 43 countries,13,000 suppliers, 300,000 parts designed in 3D in CATIA and a PDM system that saw between 75,000-100,000 accesses a week (Briggs, 2012). While the aforementioned dimensions of the engineering process have undergone dramatic change, the overall process and project management methodologies have remained largely unaltered, with the plan-driven and phase-gated approaches described by VDI221 (Jänsch & Birkhofer, 2006) and NASA (Briggs, 2003) back in the 1950s and 60s respectively providing the basis for most industrial processes. Although it is self-evident from the global advances in technology and products that the engineering process has, in general, been effectively undertaken; many large engineering projects (civil, aerospace, automotive and pharmaceuticals) experience significant problems in terms of their execution. These include, for example, technical, process, people and contractual issues, which have led to major cost overruns. High profile examples of major cost overruns are the development of the Airbus A380 (2-year overrun and 2 billion euro overspend (Anon, 2009)) and the Boeing Dreamliner (2+ year overrun and $10 billion overspend (Drew, 2009)). It might appear that such major cost overruns are one-offs, however, the cost implications arising from overruns on engineering projects has been evaluated by the US National Science Foundation who reported an estimated total value of delay and cost overruns of $150M/day for the US Department of Defence alone (NSF, 2010).