DATA FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN: MAPS AND GAPS
Insight shows that ED studies have a great potential in the usage of many data sources, but also that there exist some gaps to be solved in order to reach a more effective data usage in the context of ED.
Abstract
Abstract Data, information and knowledge are strongly involved in Engineering Design (ED) process. Despite the crucial role played by data in the design process, there is a lack of studies about how different data are used and generated by the various phases of the ED process. This study is a first attempt to fill this gap by mapping which data types are involved in the different ED phases from a research perspective. In order to achieve this objective, we used a methodology based on Text Mining. Firstly, we retrieve a corpus of scientific papers related to ED; then, we build two lexicons to recognize ED phases and data types; finally, we collect these entities within ED papers and map the relations between them. The methodology application allows the building of a network graph for visualizing the relations among data lexicon and ED lexicon. Then, we investigate the specific relations among data types and ED phases by building a heatmap to investigate data types from 3 different perspective. The insight coming from our analysis shows that ED studies have a great potential in the usage of many data sources, but also that there exist some gaps to be solved in order to reach a more effective data usage in the context of ED.