Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Process: Building a Common Design Network across Engineering Disciplines

• Author / Creator

  Butt, Mehwish

• Design and engineering design process are necessary components of engineering education. They teach early stage engineering undergraduates about the temporal and organizational nature of the design process and give them the first exposure to the nature of engineering design and its different stages. Currently, in many places, including the University of Alberta, engineering design is taught with a focus on teaching discipline specific design stages and their components. However, Current transdisciplinary product development in industries greatly emphasizes the need for enriching the engineering education curriculum to cope up with existing industrial demands such as giving a clear understanding of a generic product design process while transcending the terminology barriers of discipline specific terminology. Prior industrial research on transdisciplinary product development identifies the existence of a common engineering design process across multiple disciplines. These stages are planning; concept development; system-level design; detail design; implementation and testing; and final production. Noticeable efforts have been done to show the evidence of design process commonalities in the industrial sector, however; very little data is available for similar findings in the field of engineering education. In the context of the above implication, this thesis is based on an empirical study with an aim to identify commonalities between engineering design processes taught across engineering departments at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Engineering. The data for research is collected through structured one-on-one interviews, conducted with 34 engineering design professors from 8 engineering disciplines namely mechanical, chemical, civil, petroleum, mining and materials, electrical and computer engineering. This study is based on two sections of the interview: open ended questions section on engineering design process and a cognitive game task, based on the aforementioned common engineering design process and Bloom’s Taxonomy. The purpose of study is to analyse design stages and design activities from multiple disciplines, identify the design concepts, and finally validate the semantic similarity between them. This is achieved through anaytical and computational techniques which are applied using Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), respectively. The data collected through this empirical study generated 1566 design activities and 1611 engineering design concepts distributed among six cognitive levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and across the six design stages for the 4 engineering departments. Initially, SUMO is used to relate design concepts based on their semantic meaning. Next, these semantic relations are verified, through NLP techniques to validate the underlying commonalities between them. In addition, the similarity between disciplinarily design stages is achieved by mapping them on the proposed six-stage engineering design process. Thus, the results achieved reveal that the commonalities exist across disciplines irrespective of the different terminologies and nature of products. On the basis of above commonalities, this study suggests that the proposed design process can be taught as a common transdisciplinary engineering design process to the undergraduate students. The methodology applied during this thesis results in finding: 1) a collection of most commonly occurring engineering design concepts in each discipline; 2) achieving a structured mapping of discipline-specific engineering design processes on a common design process; 3) the development of a Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Education Ontology (TEDEO); and 4) an initial research on the commonality of design concepts between course contents taught in each discipline. These findings, together with TEDEO can be implemented in improving any engineering design curriculum thereby, bringing engineering education in line with the current transdisciplinary industrial practices.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Semantics
  • Transdisciplinary
  • Ontology

• Graduation date

  Spring 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-84v2-0432

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.